Pride and no prejudice: how Tough Guy Book Club taught 10,000 men to be unashamed of reading

For 14 years, Leighton has run the Tough Guy Book Club, a not-for-profit charity dedicated to encouraging men to read. "We're not a reading club, we're a talking club," he says. "The three goals of book club are: read more, talk more, have more friends."

Humble beginnings

Leighton was once a tough kid himself but in 2012 he found himself in need of purpose: "I'd made some pretty bad choices and I was really unhappy. My partner had just left, my business had closed down and I didn't have any friends." A book club was a way "to get me out of the house cause I had pretty much fucked my life up".

At the start, the club was just Leighton and his mate Tom Scott. As they sat discussing their first book – Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea – in the beer garden of a Collingwood pub, they had an encounter that would change everything. A stranger, "a big guy, a neck-tat dude", approached and asked if they were in a book club. When Leighton confirmed they were, certain that he was about to get punched in the head, the man immediately asked, "Can I join?"

Global growth

"We just invited people who didn't think they were invited," Leighton says. "And we invited people in places where they didn't usually get invited." When they put fliers up in tattoo parlours, men's barbers and boxing gyms, the interest was immediate: Tough Guy Book Club now runs chapters in 10 countries and has 10,000 members worldwide.

Individual chapters are organised and run locally, meeting at 7pm on the first Wednesday of every month. As for the name, several variations were tried out but "every time I said Tough Guy Book Club and someone laughed, I got more and more determined to call it that", Leighton says. "Because those two things, toughness and reading, for some reason they've become so separate that, when you push them together, people think you're doing comedy."

Breaking stereotypes

Incongruity is a powerful weapon and a great recruitment tool but it can also reinforce cultural stereotypes around literacy and masculinity, something Leighton is fighting to change. "I'm not what a reader looks like," he says. "I'm not invited to the local literary festival." The typical Tough Guy Book Club member "is not telling you he wants to read more; he's not walking around bookstores".

The focus is determinedly analogue; the club is only held "in person, at the pub and in your neighbourhood. We don't want to do meetings online." For former NRL player and BookTok sensation Luke Bateman, the online space was an essential conduit to the world of reading and a lifeline when he was at his lowest.