CASWA’s Book Fairy Project 2022
You might remember that last year as part of the global 16 days of activism against gender based violence and abuse, which runs annually from the 25th of November to the 10th of December, we launched our first Book Fairy Project! Well this year we ran the project again and had a fantastic response from our community! We thought we’d do a wee write up as we know some of you appreciated having the list of recommended reading for yourself or for last minute present ideas!
Back in October, before the 16 days of activism started, we approached our staff tea, board members and took to our social media platforms to ask our followers for some recommendations of women-centred and/or feminist fiction and non-fiction literature that they thought would be good for the project. The response to this was great and we can’t thank our lovely followers and community members enough for all their suggestions. We ended up with a list of over 30 books recommended to us and our project team whittled this down to the following 16 books:
- Laura Bates – Fix the System, Not the Women
- Nikita Gills – Fierce Fairytales
- Sheri S. Tepper – The Gate to a Woman’s County
- Vashti Harrison – Think Big, Little One
- Elena Favilli & Francesca Cavallo – Goodnight Stories of Rebel Girls
- Mairi Kidd – We are all Witches
- Jenni Fagan – Hex
- Glennon Doyle – Untamed
- Clarissa Pinkola Estes – Women Who Run With Wolves
- Ella Risbridger – Midnight Chicken
- Kris Hellenga – Glittering a Turd
- Rebecca Wait – I’m Sorry You Feel That Way
- Kirsty Capes – Careless
- Kathleen Glasgow – Girl In Pieces
- Yvette Cooper – She Speaks
- Donna Ashworth – To The Women
Not only were our social media incredibly helpful with their suggestions they were also very generous! As we are a charity, we decided this year that we would put together CASWA’s first Amazon Wish list to seek donations to the project of the 16 chosen book. We were blown away by the response to this – within 45 minutes of going live, 5 books had been purchased! We were very grateful to be gifted ALL of the above books for this year’s project, a truly great show of community spirit and support!
If you were following our social media pages closely you might have noticed that WAY more than 16 books went out this year and that was thanks to an amazingly generous donation from the Dornoch Bookstore who very kindly donated 20 books to our project this year! They donated some of the books that went out during 2021’s Book Fairy Project! We’d like to say a huge THANK YOU to Dornoch Bookshop for this extremely kind gesture to help us spread even more awareness, literature and magic across Caithness and Sutherland! The books donated by Dornoch Book store and other books we recommended last year were as follows:
- The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
- The Color Purple – Alice Walker
- Feminists Don’t Wear Pink (and other lies): Amazing women on what the F-word means to them – Curated by Scarlett Curtis
- Bad Feminist – Roxane Gay
- She Must be Mad – Charley Cox
- The Evolution of a Girl - L.E. Bowman
- Bloody Brilliant Women: The Pioneers, Revolutionaries and Genuises your History Teacher Forgot to Mention – Cathy Newman
- The Testaments – Margaret Atwood
- We Set the Dark on Fire – Tehlor Kay Majia
- Queenie – Candice Carty Williams
- It Ends With Us - Colleen Hoover
- The Gilded Ones – Namina Forna
- The Mercies – Kiran Millwood Hargrave
- If Women Rose Rooted: The Journey to Authenticity and Belonging – Sharon Blackie
- We Need to Talk – Agnes Torok
- Rage Becomes Her: The Power of a Women’s Anger – Soraya Chemaly
- The Guilty Feminist – Deborah Frances-White
- We Should All Be Feminists – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
- Dear Ijeawele: A Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions - Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
- Girl,Women, Other – Bernadine Evaristo
- Vox – Christina Dalcher
- I am Malala - Malala Yousafzai
- Do it Like a Woman - Caroline Criado Perez
- F is For Feminism: An Alphabet Book of Empowerment - Carolyn Suzuki
- Girls Who Changed the World – Michelle Roehm McCann
- Castles of Steel and Thunder – Gail Anthea Brown
Three of our book fairies spent a morning in the workshop wrapping the books up bonnie to be distributed across Caithness and Sutherland during 16 days by eleven book fairies who popped on their fairy wings and travels North, East, West and South and everywhere in between to leave a wee literature surprise for a lucky finder. We’d like to everyone who got in touch to share the magic and let us know you found one of our books – we love hearing from you! Special thanks to our fairies who have now hung up their wings for another year.
The goal of our book fairy project was to raise awareness of CASWA and gender-based violence and abuse during the period of activism, share some great feminist and/or women-centred literature with our community and bring a wee bit of magic to someone’s day!
A press article, featured in both the John o’Groat Journal and Northern Times, about the project can be found here:
We’re building up quite a list of recommended reading and we’re adding some of these to our reading lists! HAPPY READING!