James and the Giant Peach events planned for Roald Dahl Day

Penguin Random House (PRH) Children’s and The Roald Dahl Story Company are planning a series of events based on James and the Giant Peach for this year’s Roald Dahl Day on 13th September.

The Roald Dahl Story Company, which manages Dahl’s copyrights and trademarks, is working with the Natural History Museum on a celebration of insects and the natural world on 8-9th September. Throughout the month the Forestry Commission will run activity weekends with activities such as peach volleyball, centipede races and crafting creatures, and on the weekend of 15/16th September Rococo Chocolates will run James-inspired workshops in their flagship stop in London.

On the publishing side, PRH Children’s will promote its a new edition of James and the Giant Peach with illustrations by Quentin Blake and fuzzy stickers, first released earlier this year, and a new audio recording of the book, read by Julian Rhind-Tutt.

The publisher will also push Roald Dahl's James’ Giant Bug Book, with facts about insects, and two board books for young readers: Roald Dahl’s 1 2 3 and Roald Dahl’s Opposites, as well as a Roald Dahl party packs.

James and the Giant Peach was Dahl’s first book for children and was published in 1961, with illustrations by Nancy Ekholm Burkert. It tells the story of James, who enters a giant peach and has an adventure with the bugs he finds inside, including a grasshopper and a ladybug.

The novel has sold  596,818 copies through Nielsen BookScan since 1998.