The Big Jubilee Read is a 2022 campaign to promote reading for pleasure and to celebrate the Platinum Jubilee of Elizabeth II. A list of 70 books by Commonwealth authors, 10 from each decade of Elizabeth II's reign, was selected by a panel of experts and announced by the BBC and The Reading Agency on 18 April 2022. Includes list of titles with images of covers
Selection process An initial long-list was compiled from readers' suggestions, and a panel of librarians, booksellers and "literature specialists" made the choice of 70 titles, aiming "to engage all readers in the discovery and celebration of great books". The project received funding from the Arts Council and is supported by Libraries Connected and the Booksellers Association.
The organisers hope that the project will "celebrate the joy of reading and the power that it has to connect people across the country and among nations". Nineteen of the books are winners of the Booker Prize.
Most of the books are novels written in English, but there are also poetry collections such as Death of a Naturalist and short story collections including The Boat, while One Moonlit Night was published in Welsh as Un Nos Ola Leuad; Le Procès-Verbal and Our Lady of the Nile were originally in French; and Shuggie Bain is in English but has dialogue in Scots.
The list The list was published by the BBC on 18 April 2022. The full list Title Author Year Country(as stated in official list) 1952 1953 In the Castle of My Skin 1953 My Bones and My Flute 1955 1956 1958 To Sir, With Love 1959 One Moonlit Night 1961 1961 Sunlight on a Broken Column 1961 1962 1963 1963 Arrow of God 1964 Death of a Naturalist 1966 Northern Ireland Wide Sargasso Sea 1966 Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o 1967 Picnic at Hanging Rock 1967 1968 When Rain Clouds Gather 1968 1972 1974 1977 1978 1978 Who Do You Think You Are? 1978 1979 Tsotsi 1980 Clear Light of Day 1980 Midnight's Children 1981 Schindler's Ark 1982 Beka Lamb 1982 1984 1985 Summer Lightning 1986 1987 1989 Omeros 1990 1991 Cloudstreet 1991 1992 1993 Paradise 1994 1995 Salt 1996 1997 1999 Disgrace 1999 White Teeth 2000 Life of Pi 2001 Small Island 2004 2005 2005 Half of a Yellow Sun 2006 2007 2008 Wolf Hall 2009 2009 2010 Chinaman 2010 Our Lady of the Nile 2012 2013 Behold the Dreamers 2016 2016 How We Disappeared 2019 Girl, Woman, Other 2019 2019 Shuggie Bain 2020 2021 2021 Commonwealth nations by number of books Where an author is given two countries of origin in the above list, 0.5 is given to each country. Country Books Population 11 68 7.5 26 7 1,417 5 39 3.5 5.5 33.0 3 5.1 3 218 2.5 22 2 0.8 2 1.4 1.5 3.2 10.1 1 0.2 1 0.3 1 0.4 Northern Ireland 1 1.9 15.6 1 14 1 28 133 1 57 1 169 1 231 0.5 0.1 0.5 1.3 0.5 2.3 0.58.4 0.5 33 0.5 64 0.5 66
Omissions and other issues Commentators discussed several omissions of potential titles: J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings (ranked number 1 in the 2003 The Big Read); J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter books; Terry Pratchett's Discworld series; Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy, Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook; and the work of Dick Francis, reportedly one of the Queen's favourite authors. The inclusion of Northern Irish writer Seamus Heaney was explained by the fact that when he wrote Death of a Naturalist he was living in the UK and published by an English publisher; Heaney identified as an Irish nationalist and had previously objected to his inclusion in The Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry.
In The Telegraph, Allison Pearson called it a You'll take your medicine and like it' kind of list compiled by people who were scared stiff of not being diverse enough." Similarly, in The Article, David Herman complained: "If you like Hornblower or James Bond, witches and hobbits, great children's literature, popular poetry or drama, The Big Jubilee Read doesn't care. What it does care about is post-colonial, ideally non-white, literature."
References
External links Lists of titles, by decade, with cover image for each title and a paragraph about the decade in Commonwealth literature; links to a book description for every title