The most important part of the London Kids Lit Fest — officially the London Children's Literature Festival — is the part the public never sees.

On Barnes Green, it looks like a particularly joyful village fair: striped tents, famous authors, queues of excited children, and tables piled high with books. At our stand, more than 350 children stopped by to discover my wife's book, Max the Gemstone Finder, and to get their hands on the gemstones and activity sheets spread across the table.

I should confess that I arrived assuming that any festival selling about 10,000 tickets covering a hundred events, with famous authors and long queues, must be a polished commercial operation. I was wrong. More surprisingly, I had misunderstood what the weekend actually was: the culmination, and the funding engine, of a much bigger operation.

The London Kids Lit Fest ran for six weeks, from mid-May to the end of June, with much of the real work taking place on weekdays, out of public view: a schools programme delivering free live author events to state-primary classrooms across at least 11 London boroughs.

This year, it provided more than 20,000 free places. Many of those children come from disadvantaged backgrounds. Some do not own a single book. The ticketed weekend in Barnes — the tents, the signings, the festival bustle — helps to pay for it. The organisation estimates that each free place costs about £5. It is delivered largely by volunteers, without government funding or a headline sponsor.

That raises a question worth asking in Bermuda: what if a book festival was not simply a celebration for children who already read, but a way of giving access to the ones who do not?

This curiosity led me to seek out the festival’s founder, Amanda Brettargh, who first noticed the opportunity while working in publishing more than a decade ago. At adult literary events, she watched attention wander. At the children's sessions, peripheral events as opposed to the focus, is where the room came alive.

When Brettargh moved to Barnes, the idea followed her.

“My children would play around beautiful Barnes Pond every day,” she told me, “and I would think, what they really need here is a children's literature festival.”

In 2014, when a group of book-loving parents from her children's school went looking for a library fundraiser, the festival was born.

“We believe in the magic that happens when children meet the authors and illustrators of a book they have read,” Brettargh told me. The ambition is not to celebrate children who already love books. It is to reach the ones who don't yet see themselves as readers — through books as film, theatre, music, art, football, whatever it takes — and to let every child discover that books are written by real people, just like them. “To encourage them to think: maybe I could do that.”

Her favourite story from the early years involves a small boy who climbed one of the great trees on Barnes Green and declined to come down. The fire brigade was summoned; the situation was eventually resolved by the ice cream man, using the traditional method of one scoop of vanilla. The boy descended with a book under each arm.

“My eyes wouldn't stop reading,” he explained.

This matters because children do not become readers simply because adults tell them reading is important. They become readers when books feel relevant, when they find stories that recognise them and when they begin to see reading as something they are capable of enjoying. Meeting the person behind a book can puncture the idea that literature belongs to somebody else.

Which brings me home. Bermuda would not be starting from nothing. We already have authors, librarians, teachers, booksellers, sponsors and a well-established free reading festival. The Delta Sigma Theta Children's Reading Festival has drawn families to Victoria Park for years, putting a free book in every child's hands. The National Library runs year-round programmes. Bermudian authors have proved that we have the talent: Elizabeth Mulderig's Tiny the Tree Frog series is cited by its publisher as having sold nearly 80,000 copies — on an island of 64,000 people.

And yet, like many communities, we face challenges in getting every young reader to where they need to be. What Bermuda does not have yet is a single model that joins all the pieces together at scale: public motivation and excitement on one side, with sustained classroom access on the other.

The question for Bermuda is not whether we have the ingredients. It is whether anyone will decide to start.

My final question for Brettargh was what she tells the librarians and bookshop owners who write to her from around the world wanting to start a festival of their own. Her answer was four words long.

“Put your poster up.”

• Paolo Odoli is a captain in the Royal Bermuda Regiment, on leave of absence in Italy