ACADEMIA Letters Story Makers Press: can involving children in the writing of novels promote reading for pleasure? Tom Dobson Lisa Stephenson Ana De Arede Introduction Recent surveys in England and indicate that reading for pleasure is on the decline (National Literacy Trust, 2019; Cremin, 2011). This is of concern as international data indicates that reading for pleasure is inextricable from reading attainment (Gibbons, 2010). There are many reasons why reading for pleasure is declining, including the way books are commodified by performativity (Ball, 2016) as well as how the books that children read are not always relevant to them. The issue of relevance has been widely discussed. Surveys in England by the Centre for Literacy in Primary Education (2020) and Harris, Stiell, and Leather (2019) indicate a lack of diversity in children’s literature. This means that children are picking up books which depict white middle class characters with whom they cannot connect. In response to this, in 2018 we set up our own University-based Children’s Press - Story Makers Press (SMP). SMP is unique in that involves groups of marginalised children in the co-construction of stories for publication, valuing their voices as they are heard by other children. In this article, we undertake a meta-synthesis of data from SMP’s first three publications, written with and are aimed at children aged 8 to 11 years: The Nightmare Catcher (2019); Zalfa Emir is a Warrior (2020); Chasing the Volcano (2020). Our meta-synthesis illumi- nates how children drew upon their “funds of knowledge” (Moll, 1992) to create texts that are Academia Letters, January 2021 Corresponding Author: Tom Dobson, t.w.dobson@leedsbeckett.ac.uk Citation: Dobson, T., Stephenson, L., Arede, A.D. (2021). Story Makers Press: can involving children in the writing of novels promote reading for pleasure? Academia Letters, Article 206. https://doi.org/10.20935/AL206. 1 ©2021 by Academia Inc. — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0