Fatima Bhutto and Sanam Maher are making sure you stay home and stay reading

Fatima Bhutto is working on an initiative to support authors while we’re all social distancing.

The writer collaborated with The Sensational Life and Death of Qandeel Baloch author Sanam Maher to launch Stay Home – Stay Reading – a project to support all the writers and readers whose work has been affected negatively due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

Bhutto took to Instagram to reveal the news:

View this post on Instagram

Hi everyone, Over the past few weeks, Sanam Maher (@topbastard) and I have been hearing from fellow writers whose work/ability to support themselves financially has been affected by shutdowns and the need for social distancing – those with new books out are unable to promote them, bookshops can only accommodate online orders, litfests and events have been cancelled, and reviews seem to barely make a splash when there's so much else on the news competing for our attention. With all the bad news coming our way, we wanted to find something, however small, that we could do to help out. 'Stay Home, Stay Reading' is a project that we hope will support writers and readers alike during this strange time: we have writers from all over the world sending us videos reading from their work and works that bring them comfort or joy at this time. If you're looking for new reads to keep you busy, please support these writers, publishers and booksellers by buying the books (even as gifts!), and if you're not able to do so right now, follow them on social media to keep up with their work now and in the future. We hope the videos give you small breaks in a feed full of noise and the news right now – there's something comforting about being read to, don't you think? Please share the videos widely using #stayhomestayreading as that helps the writers get their work out too. Stay tuned for our wonderful authors – we’ll be sharing the videos on our IG accounts + with #stayhomestayreading Stay safe, and stay home, stay reading. We'd like to thank Shehzil Malik (@shehzilm) for generously creating artwork for this project. With love Fatima & Sanam

A post shared by Fatima Bhutto (@fbhutto) on Mar 27, 2020 at 12:58am PDT

“The idea is that we will bring to you short readings from writers around the world, from different cities, different countries and different genres of writing who are going to share two videos with us,” she shared.

“One video will be a short reading from their own work that they want to share with new readers, and the second video will be them recommending books that they love, or that are bringing them some comfort and solace in these strange moments that we’re going through.”

Fatima @fbhutto and I are so pleased to share ‘Stay Home, Stay Reading’, a project we’ve been working on to support writers affected by litfest/event cancellations, shop closures and the need for social distancing. Watch our video for more info #stayhomestayreading
Art: @shehzilm pic.twitter.com/qW1FDfJcnn

— Sanam Maher (@SanamMKhi) March 27, 2020

Sanam Maher added, “What we really want is for writers to have some support right now.”

Both Bhutto and Maher had to cancel their book events due to the spread of the coronavirus.

“We just wanted to allow writers to get some space where they can talk to you about their books, share their work, and just tell you what else they’re reading. Its comforting to be read to, right now. Its quite nice,” explained Maher.

These are lonely, sometimes terrifying times. One of the purposes of #stayhomestayreading was to share moments of respite, however brief. Omar @omarbinmusa is a poet, a rapper, an artist and a novelist. Thank you Omar for this recitation in dark times https://t.co/0RyeAsXaeL pic.twitter.com/h6yozjs8yC

— fatima bhutto (@fbhutto) March 28, 2020

“This will be a small community where you can check in every day and spend a little bit of your screen-time learning something new, and feeling something new,” said Fatima.

We love how people are getting inventive during this global pandemic and doing what they can to support fellows of their field. Shout-out to the innovative folks who are making sure creativity doesn’t die in these hard times.