Late reader to literary legend: Nick Butterworth inspires pupils to read

An award-winning children's author who said he could not read until the age of eight visited a school library to inspire children to take up reading.

Percy the Park Keeper creator Nick Butterworth, 80, had previously auctioned off artwork to raise money for a library at Lionwood Infant School in Norwich, Norfolk, a few years ago.

In his latest visit, he said: "I just believe in libraries for schools, so many schools have lost libraries, and so I wanted to support them."

Butterworth said they had transformed the "uninspiring room" into a room that "kids want to come in and immerse themselves in stories".

Speaking to BBC Look East, Butterworth said: "There is something very personal about stories to me - I couldn't read until I was 8/9, but my mum reading stories to me [got me] hooked on stories - I wasn't hooked on reading - I was hooked on stories.

"She read to me long after children are read to, and she read me things like Moby-Dick and Tom Brown's School Days, Alice in Wonderland, and I fell in love with the languages as well as the stories themselves.

"I love that business of opening the cover of a book like a door that you go through into another world - I mean that is Alice in Wonderland."

Butterworth said reading to children at a very young age helps build strong relationships with them as well as filling them up with curiosity about how the world works.

"I want to see children reading and being read to just for the pleasure of it," he said, adding that children will pick up the language skills through that.

"Stories take us to places that we wouldn't normally have access to, and we get to meet people through stories that we would never come across.

"People whose lives are very different to ours, some better off and some much worse off than us."

He said he wished people would read stories for longer than they did, and added: "[We] watch a film together but wouldn't it be nice to sit down as a family and read a chapter of a book every night."

Selene Sawyer, executive headteacher of Lionwood, said Butterworth had been a "key feature" in getting the library up and running.

She said he was instrumental in donating a range of books, reading with the children and donating his artwork for auction.

Sawyer said the library deliberately does not have any screens, adding: "There are so many opportunities for children to just pick up a phone or an iPad and read on that, but the importance of being able to take time and look and understand text in its purest form is the most important thing."

Reception teacher Maisie Potter has started to teach her class how to read and said she tries to use screens as little as possible.

"[Storytelling] really helps with their imagination, and a lot of children don't get the opportunity to go into a different world, and they don't get to see as much as a book can give you," she said.

"We try and read them stories that could take them to a different place that they might not be able to go or have access to."

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