Bibliotheca Alexandrina Launches Second Grand Reading Award

The Bibliotheca Alexandrina (BA) has announced the commencement of the 2025–2026 edition of its annual reading competition, the ‘Grand Reading Prize’. The contest is open to participants across Egypt, with a special focus on young adults aged 18 to 40. For this edition, the theme is “Egypt in the First Half of the 20th Century: Societal Transformations and a Nation’s Renaissance”, chosen to reflect a pivotal era in modern Egyptian history marked by political, cultural and economic change. The BA stated that the theme seeks to engage readers with this transformative period. According to the announcement, the first edition under the slogan “Live A Thousand Years with Reading” was held the previous year and recorded strong participation in both numbers and diversity of entrants, which the BA said confirmed youth engagement in reading and knowledge-seeking activities. Prizes will be distributed during the second half of July 2026 on the occasion of the Alexandria International Book Fair. The winners will be announced on 30 June 2026. Among the awards: the first prize recipient will receive EGP 50,000, the second EGP 40,000, the third EGP 30,000, and multiple lower-tier prizes scale down to EGP 3,000 for entrants ranked fifty-first to one-hundredth.  For further details and registration, interested participants can visit the official Bibliotheca Alexandrina website and the dedicated prize platforms.