2013 Fickling Lecture by Sarah Brown

The 2012-13 Fickling Lecture will be delivered by Sarah Brown on 25 April 2013. Sarah Brown is an advocate for women’s health and global education issues around the world. She is a member of the High Level Panel for Global Education, the Founder and President of the Children’s charity PiggyBankKids, and the author of Behind the Black Door, an account of life in Downing Street during the Prime Ministership of her husband, Gordon Brown.

This year's Fickling Lecture stresses the importance of supporting literacy and education initiatives globally, a need brought to public attention when Taliban gunmen attempted to assassinate schoolgirl-activist Malala Yousafzai in October 2012. Sarah Brown's Lecture will be called "A Promise to Malala - Children's Literature and Education for All." It will focus on the Education for All drive to get the 61 million children into school who are missing out, and the 200+ million more who need education and learning. Sarah will have children's literature as her starting point as the basis of good learning and personal development, and will reference international examples of children's stories used in learning/education context. She will talk about the scope of the campaign and various global activities to provide education for every child by the end of 2015 (the deadline for the UN's Millennium Development Goals, including Universal Primary Education). Sarah will also talk about her visits to Seven Stories and her engagement with Book Trust over the years.

The lecture will be delivered from 5:30-6:30 in the Curtis Auditorium, Herschel Building, Newcastle University, directly opposite Haymarket Metro Station. Previous Fickling Lectures can be viewed by clicking on the archives tab at http://www.ncl.ac.uk/events/public-lectures/ and typing in the names of speakers (the first three Fickling Lectures, given by Philip Pullman, Andrew Motion and James Naughtie) were not recorded but you can watch and listen to Sandi Toksvig, Nick Hornby, Roddy Doyle, Shami Chakrabarti and, if you can't attend her lecture in person or would like to listen to her again, in due course, Sarah Brown).