I left school at sixteen with two GCSEs, a moderately bright kid with loads of family problems: school seemed irrelevant but books always offered escape routes, doors, clear spaces.

Later on, as a young single mother, I returned to education, and was lucky to find a great teacher in Brian Nellist in the School of English at the University of Liverpool. I gained a First Class degree and spent three years writing a PhD under Brian's supervision: 'Visionary Realism - from George Eliot to Doris Lessing', mapping out a series of thoughts I've been circling ever since; basically how books give us a way of holding complex and divergent truths.

In 1986 I married Philip Davis, a lecturer in the School of English at the University of Liverpool (and now editor of The Reader magazine and head of School of Arts). His ground-breaking new MA, Reading in Practice, addresses some of the issues that come up for people involved in the Get Into Reading project and develops a thoughtful literary basis from which new practice may grow.

I taught for fifteen years in the Department of Continuing Education at Liverpool, and it was in those classes that she began to develop the read-aloud and personal response model which is at the heart of Get Into Reading.

Literature is not an aesthetic experience but practical help for being human and I started Get Into Reading to address the waste of this fabulous resource, the thing Doris Lessing, in her 2007 Nobel acceptance speech, called “a treasure-house of literature”.

I was so dismayed that such a tiny minority of the population ever got to read George Herbert, or George Eliot or Dante that she set to get books out of the University and into the hands of people who, she felt, could really benefit from them. And they did. She set up the first Get Into Reading group in a small library in Birkenhead, Wirral with young single mums and this five-week pilot was so successful that it led to the development of a continuous, and growing Get Into Reading project. We now run over 200 Get Into Reading groups, over 170 of them on Merseyside.

I want to make a bigger place for books and reading in the heart of the nation, bringing about a Reading Revolution - great books reaching everybody - because, while the other arts do all kinds of wonderful things, only books allow us to fully understand the human experience.

I want to make a bigger place for books and reading in the heart of the nation, bringing about a Reading Revolution - great books reaching everybody - because, while the other arts do all kinds of wonderful things, only books allow us to fully understand the human experience.