Rashmi Sirdeshpande is an award-winning children's author who writes a happy mix of fiction and non-fiction. She was an official World Book Day author for 2022. She loves taking big ideas and making them accessible and exciting for young readers. When she's not playing with words, you'll find her on her yoga mat twisting herself into all sort of shapes.
 

EmpathyLab is the first organisation to build children's empathy, literacy and social activism through a systematic use of high-quality literature. Their strategy builds on new scientific evidence showing the power of reading to build real-life empathy skills. They believe that empathy is a beacon of hope in a divided world.

When EmpathyLab was founded in 2014, it set out to understand whether society was making the most of this link, and to explore the implications of the research. Work started with a large cross-disciplinary Think-In at the South Bank Centre, and quickly uncovered that educationalists, academics and authors were as keen as EmpathyLab's founders to see if stories could be used more deliberately to develop young people's experience of empathy and their ability to put it into action.