Global Book Crawl, an Event Celebrating Indie Bookshops, Debuts in Sydney This Month

Next week, international initiative Global Book Crawl lands Down Under, inviting readers from all over the country to make moves to their city’s indie bookstores. And it’s Sydney’s time to get in on the action.

Here’s how it works: collect a special Global Book Crawl passport then, from April 21 to 27, drop into as many participating bookshops as you can to receive a stamp on your passport. These stamps become entries into the prize draw.

“It’s like a pub crawl,” Anna Low, owner of Potts Point Bookshop, tells Broadsheet. “But with books instead of booze.”

Low is organising Sydney’s crawl, where the major prize is a library pack of 50 recently published fiction and non-fiction titles (valued at $2000).

The event is running globally, with local crawls happening in Melbourne, Hobart and the Blue Mountains – but Sydney’s debut brings its own flavour. “Every city does it differently,” says Low, who’s been a bookseller for more than 25 years. “In Sydney, it’s really about the independent booksellers getting together and working together as a team. It also encourages people to go out and explore different shops [outside] the one they always go to.”

In an era dominated by algorithms and next-day delivery, the value of independent stores goes far beyond their shelves. “What most local bookshops provide that the digital world [can’t] is curation of the experience. We have incredible knowledge about local and international things. We can help people find the book they’re looking for, or recommend things. There’s an incredible wealth of knowledge in the staff, so it’s just a much better experience.”

The participating book stores are Abbey’s Bookshop, Ariel Booksellers, Better Read Than Dead, Bookoccino, Kinokuniya, Constant Reader, Getrude & Alice, Gleebooks (Glebe and Dulwich Hill), Hill of Content Bookshop, Potts Point Bookshop, Roaring Stories, The Bookshop Darlinghurst, Three Sparrows Books and Umina Beach Book Nook on the Central Coast.

And what’s Low most excited to read at the moment? She points to the Women’s Prize for Fiction shortlist and other soon-to-be-released work by Australian novelists, like Lonely Mouth by Jacqueline Maley and Landfall by James Bradley. (Early copies of these are available as part of the Book Crawl prize.) Just-released Signs of Damage by Diana Reid and Everything Is Indian by Justin Narayan and Nicholas Jordan are on her radar, too.

Global Book Crawl hits Sydney from April 21 to 27, 2025. Passports are available to pick up from participating bookshops now.

@global.bookcrawl.australia