The Austrian edition of European Book Day took place on 24 March in the city of Vienna and it was organized by Echo Medienhaus. The event was part of the larger event Austrian Reading Aloud Day. The common goal of both events was to strengthen reading skills of the auditorium in a motivating way.
The European Book Day and The Austrian Reading Aloud Day are convinced that reading out is a key requirement for independent reading. Whoever is read to, gets desire to read for himself and to understand what she/he have read. And that, in turn, is the basic requirement for a successful education.
The Austrian Reading Aloud Day was looking for the first time not only to address to all Austrians and abroad worldwide, but also to invite writing representatives from three countries to Austria: Germany, Romania and Sweden. Each author also wrote a story for the annually redesigned reading book. They were also invited for the 5th Austrian Reading Aloud Day to come to Vienna and read their stories to an international audience.
During European Book Day the authors also had the possibility to communicate and exchange cultural experience with each other.
EBD Austria was divided into four important moments:
- Lecture by Mr. Gustav Soucek/HVB on the topic “Book trade, Publishers and Libraries in Austria”
- Contributions/ Read alouds from Romania (Ion Andrei Puican), Sweden (Jona Elings Knutsson) Germany (Andrea Penkhues) and Austria (Christoph Mauz) – in both languages (foreign and german)
- Presentation of the young adults and introduction to the exhibition of the results of their creative workshops around books
- Presentation of the works of the young people and young adults to the public.
With the target group of disadvantaged young people, two different workshops were offered in terms of content. The aim of both workshops was the creative use of language and the artistic examination of language. The young people have different vocabularies and speak different languages. It was important to use all languages. Another goal was to produce joint texts. The texts were conceived as an exhibition and displayed at the European Book Day in the Vienna Town Hall.
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EBD Austria in numbers
- Austrian Reading Aloud Day founded 2018 -> 5th year
- In 2022 more than 3.300 registered lectures on one day
- 5.500 books printed and distributed
- 98 guests committed (despite covid-19) to the event in the town hallà 57 person were present
- 4 press-releases sent out für 2022 Reading Aloud Day