We are incredibly proud to share that Pratham Books has been awarded the prestigious Library of Congress Literacy Award 2017 International Prize for StoryWeaver. The International prize is awarded to an organization based outside the United States that has made a significant and measurable contribution towards increasing literacy levels.
The award was presented to Pratham Books Chairperson Suzanne Singh and R. Sriram by Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden and philanthropist David M. Rubenstein on September 1, 2017 at the Library of Congress National Book Festival gala.
Originated by Mr. Rubenstein in 2013, the Literacy Awards honor organizations working to promote literacy and reading in the United States and worldwide. The awards recognize groups doing exemplary, innovative and replicable work, and they spotlight the need for the global community to unite in striving for universal literacy.
Suzanne Singh and R. Sriram receive the award
Through StoryWeaver, Pratham Books has scaled up the creation of multilingual content for children, so that children have access to joyful reading material in a language they are fluent in. The platform has over 4500 stories in 84 languages, all available for free. By openly licensing all the content on StoryWeaver, and with the support of a passionate and invested community of authors, illustrators, translators, educators, librarians, non profits and parents we believe that StoryWeaver can be a driving force in realising our mission of ‘a book in every child’s hand’.
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Watch this short film on the Pratham Books journey.
Our chairperson, Suzanne Singh, also shares more about what happened after the awards:
The next day was the National Book Festival which is a literature festival that had several well known writers in attendance. We set up a stall in the children’s section and several people came by to see the books. Despite the fact that most of them were in languages outside of English, people wanted to take them. A lot of people enquired about books in French, Spanish, Khmer etc. Many teachers and librarians were there and when we told them about StoryWeaver, they loved the idea of open access books.