Regions: IRELAND

Employee Book Donations for Our Anniversary

Our fifth anniversary as Penguin Random House in July 2018 provided an unprecedented opportunity to unite around the globe to get more books into the hands of more readers. Through a special anniversary global book donation, we offered every Penguin Random House employee worldwide a selection of free books to donate to any philanthropic or nonprofit organization of their choice. Thousands of our employees joined the campaign, and we were able to provide more than 72,000 books to children and adults in need. Recipient organizations included schools, libraries, hospitals, rural development NGOs, and organizations that serve homeless and incarcerated individuals.

Equipping Young People for the Future

Penguin Talks is a program of free creative talks for young people across the U.K. and Ireland. Attendees are given the opportunity to hear from and ask questions to a world-renowned thinker, writer, or influential figure from our family of authors. Held in local schools, Penguin Talks is meant to help equip students by introducing them to new ideas and perspectives. Each Penguin Talk is published in full online, together with free curriculum-based resources for teachers, in order to enable young people in classrooms to engage with the themes and issues discussed. Former Penguin Talks have included Michelle Obama speaking on the power of education and self-belief, Yuval Noah Harari on the future of the world of work, and Margaret Atwood on protest and activism. To learn more about the program, click here.

Partnership with Fighting Words

In November 2016, Penguin Random House Ireland entered into a three-year partnership with Fighting Words, a creative writing organization established by Roddy Doyle and Sean Love in 2009. This built on a wider long-term partnership between Penguin Random House U.K. and Ministry of Stories.

Fighting Words aims to help children and young people, and adults who did not have the opportunity as children, to discover and harness the power of their own imaginations and creative writing skills. Each year of the partnership, they produced an anthology of creative writing, which our editors helped to edit and our Communications team helped to publicize. We also set up author visits to schools in order to mentor students and provide tips and insight to improve their writing.

Nurturing Writers From Underrepresented Backgrounds

We launched our WriteNow program in 2016, and we’re proud to say that, to date, 450 writers have attended 9 regional events, 33 writers have joined our yearlong mentorship program, and 12 books have, thus far, been acquired through the program. Through WriteNow, we host free workshops offering information about how to get published to unpublished writers based in the U.K. and Ireland who identify as coming from an underrepresented background or community. Participants are able to hear from published authors and literary agents and receive personalized feedback on their work from an editor. The most promising writers are accepted into our yearlong mentoring program, where they are paired with one of our editors to help develop their manuscript with the ultimate aim of publishing their work. To learn more, click here.