Haley Clarke of Trelawny took home the overall crown at Jamaica's National Reading Competition — by just a few points — and she wasn't alone in flying the flag for the countryside. Rural parishes swept the top honours at the 2026 finale, held Thursday at The Jamaica Pegasus hotel in New Kingston, with Portland grabbing two wins of its own, including a mother and son being named parish champions in the same year.
Marsha-Lee Mundle and her son, Liam Williams, were parish champions for Portland in the 21-and-over and six-to-eight age categories respectively. Mundle added a national runner-up spot in her group, while fellow Portlander Yendi Burke took the parish and national title for the 12-14 age bracket. Clarke, the overall champion, was also parish and national winner in the 15-20 category.
What makes this year's competition remarkable isn't just who won — it's that so many showed up to try. A record 7,708 people registered at libraries across the island, a 37 per cent jump over last year. And they did it against the harsh backdrop of Hurricane Melissa, which battered the island and dealt a heavy blow to the Jamaica Library Service (JLS) network.
Dr Maureen Thompson, the JLS director general, painted a stark picture: 43 libraries were affected, some severely damaged, others lost entirely. The network's operating sites dropped from 109 to 85 across nine locations. "Under these circumstances, you would have thought that we would have said, what we do in competition, maybe we should postpone it," she said. Instead, the staff chose the opposite. They embraced the year's theme — "Together We Read, Together We Rise" — and mobilised an islandwide campaign that produced the biggest turnout ever in the competition's 38-year history.
The resilience extended beyond the awards. New board chairman Nicole Campbell McLaren shared a vision of libraries as lively community hubs — places for poetry nights, book clubs, even cafes, where young people feel excited to gather. And Renee Wallace, the new 2026 reading ambassador, a book creator and influencer at Ren's Bookish Space online, plans to meet young readers where they already are: on TikTok and Instagram. "I want to develop that spark or keep that spark alive with reading," she said.
The momentum is clear. Read Across Jamaica Day hit a record 14,000 students reached, while the JLS's Jumpstart programme trains parents to support their children at home and the Read and Rhyme Fun Time brings story hours to kindergarten and primary schoolers. When a country's libraries shrink but its young readers multiply, that's the story worth telling — one that began with a few points, a Trelawny teen, and a whole island refusing to close the book.