Scottish Book Trust has given over 290,000 books to children in need of support, living in deprived areas, through food banks, community hubs and other charities.

Obviously, that’s a huge and impressive amount. And I’ll ask you to hold that figure, 290,000 books, in your head for a moment. Because those books are more than just five minutes of an entertaining yarn, quiet or looking at lovely pictures for kids. They're more than a precious object that belongs to that child too.

I've heard books described as a mirror: something in which you can see and understand yourself in and understand your place in society, your experiences and feel a sense of belonging.  

Likewise, books can be windows that allow us to look beyond our own surroundings and perceptions to experience challenges and triumphs of others who we might never encounter in our own life, feeding imagination, ambition and building one of those essential skills, empathy.

Read more from Kerry Hudson:

I would suggest books, as well as all of the above, are a ladder. They are most of all this for children on the poorest streets of Scotland, those with challenging home or school lives, who don't have a lot and deserve so much more. For those kids and young people, books can be a ladder to climb beyond the walls of deprivation and limited opportunity that have been built around them. Each page of the story is another rung. As they turn those pages, they climb up and up, until they can see over those walls to a future that could and should be theirs, where they overcome systemic inequality and have all the opportunities that children from more privileged backgrounds have.

I can say this with some confidence because I was once that child, trapped within those walls, at the bottom of one of those ladders. I grew up in a single parent family, always at the sharpest edge of poverty, living homeless hostels and women's refuges and on the roughest council estates.

I loved learning, I had a great imagination, I was smart enough. But I did not get on well in school, perhaps because I had so many of them and books were my salvation. Wherever we in our trajectory of shuttling up and down Britain looking for that hallowed ‘fresh start’, no matter how bad our situation, there were always books. There was always a library where I would go each week or a charity shop where we could buy a cherished Twinkle annual for 10p.

It’s no coincidence either that the books that I owned myself, that I could take from place to place with me, read over and over - getting sticky finger marks on the pages and poring over the pictures, learning the words by heart - were the ones that were most precious to me. When we love something we want to believe that it is ours completely, to know it cannot be taken away.

Books were my ladder, but I realise now, before that, they were a home. As though each book was a brick that I made myself a safe, secure shelter from a domestic life and outside world that often felt, and was, hostile and frightening.

Books sheltered me and then, when I was a fifteen year old troubled teen, the books that I bought from charity shops, that I loaned from libraries, that piled around my bed became my ladder. No one, least of all me, could imagine that I would become the author of two award winning novels, two memoirs, TV scripts and radio documentaries. Certainly like so many of the children I left behind on those streets, I always had the potential, but it was books that sheltered me, that allowed me the ladder to climb up and over those walls into the world that was rightly mine.

When I say the number 290,000, those are not books really, or even stories, they are a hand being held out to a child who needs support. They are a mirror, a window and a shelter. Most of all, they're a ladder out of deprivation. This is not only my story, ask any adult who’s thriving despite a deprived background and a majority will have had the same experience.

Stories matter. Representation matters. Levelling the playing field as much as possible matters deeply. Which is why children from our most deprived neighbourhoods in Scotland should have the right to life-changing qualities of books too.

If you would like to make sure a disadvantaged child gets a new book for Christmas, you can donate to our appeal with Scottish Book Trust. 

Donations support gifting books to families who need them most through food banks and community hubs. 

To bring a child magic, comfort and joy this festive period, visit scottishbooktrust/donate