How do you make reading fun for kids? Wait - isn't it fun already?

So (spoiler alert: self-promotion ahead) I got interviewed by Inqubela Foundation on their new blog. The question I found most difficult to answer was "How do we make reading fun for children?". As a child, there was literally nothing I would rather do than read a book. I still consider it one of the most fun things I can do with my time. I get why kids don't like to read on an intellectual level but on an emotional level I'm just like comeon - do you have any idea what you're missing out on? It's as thrilling smoking in the bathroom at school and not geting caught and then as #winning as going to class and finding out you just got an A on your year test and that school is cancelled for the rest of the day. It's addictive. It can't hurt you. You parents will leave you alone for long stretches of time to do it. Dudes. What's not to love?

In any case, that was not the answer I gave on the blog:

Africans need to develop relevant, exciting, diverse, cheap children’s book in all our local languages. We can’t continue to rely on only state-sanctioned textbooks or on European texts that have little relevance to children growing up in South Africa’s rural areas or on books written decades ago. We need young people to become the producers of content and we need them to write stories that are engaging, fun and intelligent. Sometimes we can be too elitist about how we think about books – kids books can be silly or funny or scary, not just educational and not just with a moral to the story. South African children need more graphic novels, more comic books, more board books and more novels for cellphones: anything that makes reading accessible and easy.

Read the full interview - it's mostly about my work