Claire Harman

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Buy The Books

Festival media partner

Supported by the Delegation of the European Union to the UK

Supporter of the festival's Voices of Europe programme

Festival cultural partner

Festival ideas partner

The Spanish Embassy: supporters of the programme of Spanish literature and culture

The Cervantes Institute, London

Festival on-site and online bookseller

Wines of the Douro Valley

Five-star hotel partners of The Oxford Collection

Oxford International Centre for Publishing

Accountants to the festival

Prestige publishing partner. Celebrating 25 years in Europe in 2024

Partner of Oxford Literary Festival

Supporters of the programme of American literature and culture

New College founded 1379

Exeter College: college home of the festival. Founded 1314

Worcester College founded 1714

Trinity College founded 1555

Magdalen College founded 1458

Reuben College founded in 2019

Brasenose College founded in 1512

Festival Digital Strategy & Web Design

Olive oil from Sicily

Alumni Office

Oxford University Images

Local radio partner

Festival information:

The Oxford Literary Festival is intellectual Viagra.

The Oxford festival is the most elegant and atmospheric of literary festivals. It’s a pleasure to both attend and perform there.

Often as an author, I only occasionally get to meet the public who buy and read my books. The Oxford Literary Festival was a special opportunity for me and certainly one of the highlights of my career – it was an honour I will never forget.

I loved the whole atmosphere of the Oxford Literary Festival. From breakfast, alongside some of the attendees, who were talking books with each other a mile a minute, to the public event at The Sheldonian where everyone was lively and engaged – I felt I had arrived in a kind of literary heaven.

I came away buzzing and reassured that we still have in this century a wide ranging community fascinated not just by famous authors (I’ve rarely seen so many concentrated in one place) but by challenging ideas and questions.

It was a privilege for me to visit the festival to receive the Bodley Medal. As an incidental blessing I saw Oxford at its most mysterious and atmospheric. It was a day of piercing cold and as I walked through the twilight from the Sheldonian to Christ Church, the streets were empty and the whole city was shutting itself away. Christ Church was silent except for the footfall of unseen persons around corners and the sounds of evensong creeping from behind closed doors. For the first time I understood thoroughly the power of college ghost stories.

The Oxford Literary Festival has in my mind become the leading literary festival of the year. The organisation, the roster of speakers, the ambience and the sheer quality of it all is superb. May it now go from strength to strength each year stretching its ambition more and more. I believe it will.

Every literary festival stays in an author’s mind for slightly individual reasons. I shall remember the Oxford festival for: - the size of the audience: at the top end of the range - their intelligence – this makes a huge difference for a speaker. In the Oxford audience I encountered many experts in the field my book covered and even one of the ambassadors I’d quoted - the beauty and the grace of the place itself – incomparable - the willingness of my hearers to buy books afterwards; I’ve never sold more.

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