Leonie Rutherford – ARC Linkage Win – Teen Reading

A fantastic outcome for Writing & Literature team member Leonie Rutherford in the latest round of Australian Research Council (ARC) grants. Together with her co-chief investigators Katya Johanson and Andrew Singleton, Leonie has won an ARC Linkage grant for the project “Discovering a ‘Good Read’: Pathways to Reading for Australian Teens”. The awarded amount is $346,097.

Building on the work already done via the “Teen Reading in the Digital Era” project, this Linkage project aims to support the school, library, and book industries to increase teenagers’ recreational reading. Matching the right book to the right reader is essential to increase young people’s motivation to read. The project will generate robust evidence on how teens discover books and the cultural factors that influence their choices. Expected outcomes include strategies that libraries, schools, and the book industry can use to promote Australian content for young adults, and to equip young people to participate more fully in the social and economic benefits of reading for pleasure.

The project’s partner organisations are the School Library Association of Victoria, the Copyright Agency Ltd, the Australian Publishers Association Ltd, the Australian Library and Information Association Ltd, and the Australian Booksellers Association. Collaborating institutions are the Queensland University of Technology, and the University of Canterbury (NZ).