Argentina honors the best initiatives to promote reading

On May 8, over the course of the Buenos Aires International Book Fair, and in a room packed with the public, awards were handed out to the best initiatives aimed at promoting reading in Argentina. The VivaLectura Awards is an initiative organized by the Santillana Foundation in collaboration with the Ministry of Education and the Organization of Ibero-American States for Education, Science and Culture (OEI). Its aim is to gather together and highlight the best initiatives to promote reading.

The award categories were Schools, Society and Digital Environments, plus a special category Reading. Notable, as every year, was not only the large number of entries received but also their quality.

The awards ceremony was attended by Undersecretary of Equality and Educational Quality of the Ministry of Education, Gabriel Brener; the director of the National Reading Plan of the Ministry of Education, Adriana Redondo, who also sat on the jury; the director of the Buenos Aires Office of the Organization of American States, Dario Pulfer; writer and jury member Paula Bombara; the Managing Director of Santillana, David Delgado Robles; Program Coordinator at the Santillana Foundation, Julieta Bentivenga.

In the selection of winners, the jury took into consideration the creativity and dynamism of the initiative, the relevance of the initiative to the target community, quality, the scale of the results achieved, and the potential for continuity.

The first prize winners in each category (Schools, Society and Digital Environments) received the sum of 25,000 pesos. Second prize was worth 8,000 pesos. In addition, all those worthy of special mentions received a small library, and the selected participants in the special category, Reading, received a diploma and a book from the publishers Alfaguara infantil y juvenil.