Lukuloma campaign brands Finnish schools’ autumn holiday as a reading holiday to promote reading among children and young people, as well as adults. The campaign urges families to read together and promotes reading as a joint hobby shared by families and friends. The word lukuloma means reading holiday in Finnish.
The theme this year is traveling by reading. In times of restricted travel, the campaign inspires families to visit places, real and imaginary, by reading books. By reading, one can travel any place in space and time, and the campaign asks, why should we restrict our travel to the real world? The campaign offers reading tips for all ages and urges everyone to visit libraries and bookshops and to find their own way of traveling with reading.
The campaign was launched on 1 October with a video greeting from the Minister of Science and Culture Annika Saarikko introducing the campaign’s theme and goals.
Lukuloma is a joint effort of various organisations and it brings together a wide spectrum of different actors from the Finnish book and reading promotion field. These include public libraries and Finnish library association, book publishers, Finnish teachers’ association, bookseller’s union, reading promotion organisations, and authors‘ unions, to name a few.
The campaign was first introduced in Finland last year and is now organised for the second time. The inspiration for the campaign came from Sweden, where the reading holiday campaign has been organised for several years. Finnish schools are having autumn holidays on the week 42, 12-18 October, and the duration of the holiday varies from one municipality to another.
Like Finland, the campaign is bilingual, and you can find more information about it in Finnish and in Swedish from Lukuloma’s website.