Creative Wales
Supporting jobs, businesses and creativity
Our main source of funding is Creative Wales, the internal Welsh Government agency that promotes the growth of the creative industries in Wales. The funding provides essential services and financial support for the Welsh publishing sector. Most of this funding is distributed externally in the form of grants to the sector, including grants for books and magazines, in print and online and in both Welsh and English.
The publishing sector is part of the Foundational Economy in Wales, sustaining skilled jobs in the creative industries, often in micro enterprises or by people working as freelancers. These roles are often located in rural areas and can be very important to Welsh-speaking communities. Books also directly benefit other creative sectors by providing the stories for Theatre, Film and TV productions, Animation and Games, to name just a few.
Creative Wales also provides support for additional projects that address specific areas and priorities. In the past this has included support for the sector to attend events like Frankfurter Buchmesse, where we promote books from Wales as cultural goods overseas, and provide opportunities for Welsh publishing talent to meet and network with likeminded creatives across international markets; and funding for the New Audiences Fund (2022-25), which was established to proactively address under-representation in the publishing industry in Wales and create opportunities for new voices and platforms.
Education
Literacy, empathy and wellbeing
The Education Department provides funding to our Children’s Books and Reading Promotion Department under the Curriculum for Wales Grant Support Programme to enable us to run schemes that promote and celebrate reading for pleasure: helping to develop literacy, empathy, and wellbeing and supporting the Curriculum for Wales.
Teachers Love Reading
BookSlam
Gornest Lyfrau
Summer Reading Challenge
World Book Day
The Education Department also funds additional special projects and interventions such as Rhyngom, our project to publish more books for young readers that represent the culture, people and history of the whole of Wales, and that celebrate and promote diversity.
Culture Division
Inspiring a lifelong love of reading
The Culture Division supports projects that foster collaboration between schools, libraries and families. We have worked closely with them to develop schemes to ensure that books are accessible to everyone, and to help ignite a lifelong love of reading.
Welsh Language
Towards Cymraeg 2050 and One Million Welsh Speakers
We safeguard and ensure the production of Welsh-language books and magazines – most of which are dependent on grant funding to some extent. We support books for adults and children; fiction and non-fiction, poetry, history, books on mental health and wellbeing, cookbooks, children’s books, books for Welsh language learners, and magazines of all kinds to make sure that readers have access to the widest possible range of reading material in Welsh.
We are a rural employer of 100% Welsh speaking staff, and we provide support and opportunities for staff who are learning Welsh to develop their Welsh-language skills. This means that we deliver a fully Welsh-language experience across every department for publishers, booksellers, libraries, schools and freelancers that want to work with us in Welsh.
Health
Books support our health and wellbeing
There are well-documented benefits of reading for both our mental and physical health.
Since 2018, the Welsh Government Health Department has supported the Reading Well scheme in Wales. We work with our partners at the Reading Agency to ensure the provision of Welsh-language titles that support people to understand and manage their health and wellbeing, using helpful reading. This has resulted in over 100 books in Welsh on health and wellbeing topics.