Love Your Bookshop Day 2025 theme announced

BookPeople has announced ‘Discover the magic. Discover you’ as the theme for Love Your Bookshop Day 2025 (LYBD), which will take place on 11 October 2025.

LYBD ‘aims to reignite Australians’ love of reading and remind people that no matter one’s life stage, local bookshops are spaces of discovery, inspiration and connection’, according to the organisation, which took inspiration from the Understanding Australian Readers report, conducted by Australia Reads and Monash University’s BehaviourWorks Australia.

Naarm-based Ngiyampaa/Ngemba, Dutch and Irish artist Emma Sjaan Beukers created this year’s LYBD artwork.

Beukers said, ‘[Bookshops] are places I love to visit to learn, discover new interests, find inspiration, and develop my own artistic and reading practices. They are a welcoming and warm place for everyone, filled with the love and magic of the stories and worlds we read about. In my artwork, I’ve taken that feeling of excitement and community connectedness and created lots of little scenes that we often see in bookshops. Bookshops are always at the forefront of communication and community, and I love that I’ve been able to create a snapshot of that.’

BookPeople CEO Robbie Egan said, ‘We want to encourage people to find the right book for right now – whether that means trying a new genre or rediscovering an old favourite. There is a book for everyone, and your local bookshop is the best place to start exploring, because booksellers know how to help you find what speaks to you, sometimes even when you aren’t sure what that is.’

As part of LYBD, BookPeople is also collecting stories from people who have ‘(re)discovered themselves at a local bookshop’, encouraging readers to share their stories.

More information about LYBD is available on the BookPeople website.

Category: Bookish dates Events Local news