Has World Book Day become a 'horrorshow'?

Akshata Murty, the wife of Rishi Sunak, poses for photographs with schoolchildren dressed up as book characters outside 10 Downing Street to mark World Book Day on 1 March, 2024

Children traditionally dress up as characters from fictional books, as pictured here in front of 10 Downing Street last year

(Image credit: Carl Court / Getty Images)

By Harriet Marsden, The Week UK

published 6 March 2025

"What began in 1998 with Tony Blair standing in the Globe Theatre to announce a new celebration of books has morphed into something much bigger," said William Cash in The Spectator. World Book Day, which sees schoolchildren dress up as their favourite book character on the first Thursday in March, "aims to promote reading for pleasure", said London's The Standard. But schools are increasingly adopting a "more flexible approach", either by ditching "best dressed" awards or abandoning costumes altogether, in response to "growing pressure on parents".

'A bit like childbirth'

World Book Day – those three words are "enough to make most of us break out in a cold sweat", said Nadia Cohen in Metro. Nobody would argue with the "push to promote children's literacy", nor with the almost 15 million £1 book tokens distributed every March. But WBD has "descended into an annual horror show of competitive costume-making, and almost every parent I know hates it with a passion". And let's not pretend it isn't "mostly mums doing the heavy lifting". In that way, WBD is "a bit like childbirth".

It's not just the gender disparity, said Emma Kernahan in The Independent. What's "always overlooked" is that costumes require time or money – or both. And that "that cost is not felt equally". A decade of austerity, a pandemic and a cost-of-living crisis have put nearly a third of children below the poverty line – the very inequalities that WBD "sets out to tackle". Something about "frantically buying disposable merch" from Amazon Prime rather "goes against the spirit of the day".

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Harriet Marsden is a writer for The Week, mostly covering UK and global news and politics. Before joining the site, she was a freelance journalist for seven years, specialising in social affairs, gender equality and culture. She worked for The Guardian, The Times and The Independent, and regularly contributed articles to The Sunday Times, The Telegraph, The New Statesman, Tortoise Media and Metro, as well as appearing on BBC Radio London, Times Radio and “Woman’s Hour”. She has a master’s in international journalism from City University, London, and was awarded the "journalist-at-large" fellowship by the Local Trust charity in 2021.