The idea behind the project

Publishing their own book – I’m sure many of us have had this dream at one time or another. We also wanted to do something good and at the same time connect people around the world: Out of this motivation, we created The Growing Book Project in 2020 and wrote a short story together with 38 authors from 15 different countries. We then published it and sold printed copies for a donation to support the Brazilian parish school Frei Alberto from São Luís, raising over 800€.

A book written by 40 authors from 15 different countries? Yes, that’s right, at first this idea seems a bit crazy, especially since each author contributed one page to the book without necessarily knowing the complete content of the book. Surprisingly, however, this worked out better than one would expect at first.
The idea for the whole project was born in April 2020: We were in the middle of the first Corona Lockdown when we started joking around a bit during a phone call and came up with this crazy idea.
Back then, when countries were closing their borders, travel was restricted and governments were mainly concerned with national issues, we wanted to reconnect people and create something together with them across national borders. So we had the idea to write an internationally written short story about life, about what drives everyone of us, and about friendship and family. The limit should only be the imagination of each author.
One thing led to another and a week after the said phone call we had found friends who wanted to be the first authors to participate, programmed a website to register other authors & publish the book pages and got the whole project rolling.
Everyone who wanted to participate could choose a period of two days in which they could then write another page for the book.

One year and countless creative writing hours later, the story has come to its conclusion and now contains 114 pages written by 40 authors from 15 different countries:
We are still thrilled by the motivation, joy and creativity with which each author wrote a unique book page in their own way.
For this reason, we also knew right away that we wanted to initiate another social action in the context of this book project as a finale: We printed the book in physical form and offered it for purchase in exchange for a donation. The amount collected then went to the Frei Alberto school (partner school of Robin’s former school, the Theodorianum in Paderborn) in northeastern Brazil. We were able to establish direct contact with the school through the Franciscan Mission from Dortmund, so that it was ensured that the full amount would arrive in São Luís.

Thank you very much for your support & for bringing life into this project!