How 'Book Queen' Dolly Parton inspired millions of children with gift of reading

Across the globe in Australia, a toddler with speech delays delighted her family with her first word - "orange" - after she and her twin sister received a free book in the post about colours. It came from Imagination Library, the literacy programme begun by late global superstar Dolly Parton.

Parton, who died this week aged 80, launched the philanthropic effort in 1995 to honour her father - whose difficult Appalachian upbringing never allowed him to finish school or learn to read and write.

"He was the smartest man I have ever known, but I know in my heart his inability to read probably kept him from fulfilling all of his dreams," wrote Parton in an open letter on Imagination Library's website.

Imagination Library sends one free book a month to children from birth to age five. It first launched in Tennessee's Sevier County, where Parton grew up, before expanding across the US in 2000. The programme, which partners with local organisations, launched in Canada in 2006, the UK the following year, then Australia in 2013 and Ireland in 2019.

By 2025, as Imagination Library celebrated its 30th anniversary, it had distributed more than 300m books - equating to one book mailed every 78 seconds, according to the organisation.

And for the families in receipt of the storybooks, the impact has been invaluable.

"It just blows my mind that it's readily available for every family that lives in my borough," said London mother-of-two Harriet Anscombe, whose four-year-old daughter has been receiving Imagination Library books since she was three months old.

The free books helped Anscombe establish a reading-focused nighttime routine.

"I think that, if I didn't get those books, maybe I wouldn't have started doing bedtime stories till she was two - but because we were getting them so early, it embedded story time into our routine from when she was just a couple of months old," Anscombe said. "She probably doesn't remember a time when we weren't reading stories."

Imagination Library became part of the family routine for Ciara Fernandez Faber, too, after she signed up her son about eight years ago in Colorado. His favourite book for years was one written by Parton herself: I Am A Rainbow.

"We read it almost every night, and I never got tired of reading it to him," said Faber, 42.

"It's a book about different emotions, and so we would act out the different emotions, the different faces," she said. "At the back of the book, there's a little excerpt by Dolly talking about how everybody has a rainbow of feelings, and we would read that - and he would always point to her picture and say, 'There's the Book Queen.'"

Families like Faber's repeatedly remarked on how well curated the books were - detailing how topics helped their children not just with reading, but also with social and emotional development.

"There were themes that were addressed in a lot of the books that would have really helped us navigate issues," said Helen Cashell, of Dublin, Ireland.