Today sees the start of the Bradford Literature Festival, with something like 150 events spread out over the next ten days.

It's a fairly phenomenal achievement for organisers Irna Qureshi and Syima Aslam to get the big names they have got to come to Bradford for an untried and untested literature festival.

It's exactly the sort of thing Bradford needs. Even if you aren't a big reader, anything that focuses positive attention on the city has got to be a good thing, right?

I hope Bradford rises to the challenge of welcoming the literary guests and attendees to the event, and that the festival is a roaring success, and goes on for many years to come.

We constantly hear today that people - especially children - don't read much. It's true there are many more distractions these days - umpteen thousand TV channels, YouTube, video games, movies on demand... and finding time to eat, sleep and go to work/school in the middle of it all.

But there's still something magical about picking up a book (or turning on your e-reader, if that's your thing) and losing yourself in the imagined world of another person's creating.

And I was privileged to be involved in the T&A's recent Children's Book Review competition, which saw us inundated with more than 700 entries from young people across the district.

It was a stunning, awe-inspiring number of entries. To think so many children had not only bothered to sit down and read a book, but then thought about it enough to put together a critical piece about it, was really, really surprising and heart-warming.

All of the reviews were wonderful. Some were excellent. And there were those that simply blew away my fellow judges - Ian Oldfield from Waterstones in Bradford and Imran Hafeez from the Bradford hub of the National Literacy Trust - and myself.

We all agreed that the standard was amazing. But what really moved us was the passion with which these young people wrote about their favourite books.

Anyone who thinks that children don't read or that books are dead ought to have a look through some of those hundreds of entries we received - it'll definitely change your mind.

If you are one of those people who doesn't read, you might well be wondering what all the fuss is about. Does it matter if people don't read books, when you think about it?

Maybe it doesn't. But then again, I think it probably does matter. Because human beings thrive on stories. From the first moment some caveman invented for himself a brutal god or slavering monster to explain away noises in the dark, we have created fiction.

Books aren't just about escapism - but would it matter anyway? God knows we all need to draw the curtains on real life now and again.

Fiction helps us understand reality. Fiction is a mirror to real life. Through the actions of made-up people, we can perhaps better understand the real people in the real world.

And these imagined worlds spring forth, just from putting all the right words in all the right places. Which is something of a miracle.