Literature Everywhere

Since 2020, Literature Everywhere has been running as a national programme of Saudi Arabia's Literature, Publishing and Translation Commission, delivered under Vision 2030's Quality of Life Program. It commissions Saudi writers, audio makers and film makers to put literature where people are, for free, in airports, cafés, malls and transport hubs across 57 cities and 13 regions, in Arabic and English, with new work each edition.
At a Saudi airport there are machines that print short stories, cut to a length you can finish before boarding, so a wait at a gate becomes the first contemporary Saudi writing a traveller may have read. 1.5 million have come out of them.
Literature Cloud works to a rule about time rather than traffic, going only into places where people tend to stay fifteen minutes or more, with the audio, podcasts and audiobooks cut to match. 228,057 people have listened.
Literary Partner does the same thing with rooms, turning cafés, cultural clubs, co-working spaces and publishing houses into places that run book clubs and poetry evenings on nights they'd otherwise be quiet, with the programme bringing the writers and the format, and the venue providing the space. It started with 20 partners and 17,705 people. By the fifth edition it was running through 220 partners and 11,677 activities, reaching more than a million people, and of the 9,240 speakers who took part, first-timers were up 68% on the edition before. Partners compete for prizes worth more than SR1 million, awarded for innovation, for representing the culture of their region, and for media presence.
Content Creators backs Saudi writers and audio makers, and through Shobak the film makers, and what it says to them is that your world might be one person or a million, so let the world see it. Arab News' Mayman Show, hosted by Hussam Al-Mayman, was the first English-language work the programme carried, and 1,199 people have since put writing and audio of their own into it.
الأدب أقرب مما تظن. Literature is closer than you think.