Dr Jane Davis is Director of The Reader Organisation, which she founded in 1997, when she launched The Reader magazine. At this time Jane was working as a teacher in the Department of Continuing Education at the University of Liverpool. In her classes Jane began to develop the read-aloud and personal response model which is at the heart of the ‘Get Into Reading’ project.
Jane's ethos is that literature is not an aesthetic experience but practical help for being human. Jane started Get Into Reading due to her dismay that such a tiny minority of the population ever got to read George Herbert, or Shakespeare, Dickens or Dante that she set to get books out of the University and into the hands of people who, she felt, could really benefit from them. She set up the first Get Into Reading group in a small library in Birkenhead in 2001 with young single mums and this five-week pilot was so successful that it led to the development of a continuous, and growing Get Into Reading project. Now there are over 200 Get Into Reading groups meeting weekly, over 170 of them on Merseyside and the project is now developing nationally.
