Our Story

LOST IN BOOKS is the brainchild of Jane Stratton and the Think+DO Tank Foundation, an arts and social impact charity that creates public art and community projects in South Western and Western Sydney. It is the Foundation’s biggest project to date.

LOST IN BOOKS is a kids’ bookshop that speaks your language. We are a multilingual bookshop, café, safe space for women, creative learning centre, and language exchange hub in Fairfield, one of Australia’s most diverse multicultural communities. 

LOST IN BOOKS offers a bountiful public program around books, literacy, multilingual conversation, and wellbeing. It is for children, young people and adults from all backgrounds. 

Staffed by bilingual workers, LOST IN BOOKS promotes multilingual literacy, community safety, connectedness and exchange. LOST IN BOOKS is a social enterprise, which means that any profits will be reinvested back into the project.

“We called the shop LOST IN BOOKS to capture the joy of being immersed in a great story and for the freedom that reading gives us.”

- Jane Stratton (Founder & CEO, Think+DO Tank Foundation)

Our Resilience

LOST IN BOOKS is a social enterprise and community hub that works hand-in-hand with local communities to disrupt monolingual models of creative production in literature and the arts. We had to temporarily close our doors back in March due to the COVID-19 pandemic but with the continued support of our team, partners, loyal customers and community of artists and volunteers, we were able to pivot our creative programs and services digitally, launch a new online shop and youtube channel LOST IN BOOKS TV.

We are proud of the resilience of our team and our community during COVID-19. Thanks to Google for recognising us and for its tools.

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Our Journey

With the help of a community crowdfunding campaign underwritten by the English Family Foundation, LOST IN BOOKS opened its doors in Fairfield – one of the most culturally and linguistically diverse place in Australia, to help newcomers grasp English and adjust to their new life whilst keeping their mother tongues alive.

We raised almost $40K via crowdfunding and found a young architect, Dominique Hage, who was excited to take on a project. With funding, community support and many long hard hours, we built Lost In Books and launched the shopfront in July 2017.

From our first day, we delivered a responsive creative program of storytelling, textiles, music, creative writing and dance. We launched a creative outreach program, Wandering Books, in partnership with Western Sydney Migrant Resource Centre supported by SSI Innovation Fund. We went on to develop:

• Forked Tongues Multilingual Storytelling Collective;

• IN OTHER WORDS literary residencies;

• IN OTHER WORDS Multilingual Arts Festival;

• Sound System Music Residency; and

• Arrival, an anthology created in collaboration with local artists to celebrate our arrival.