Poetry

Kate Kennedy Interviewed by Charlie Lee-Potter

Dweller in Shadows: A Life of Ivor Gurney
Weston Lecture Theatre 10:00am Sat 6 Saturday, 6 November 2021 See this event
John Carey Interviewed by Bernard O’Donoghue

100 Poets: A Little Anthology
Weston Lecture Theatre 10:00am Sun 7 Sunday, 7 November 2021 See this event
Michael Morpurgo, Natalie Walter and Clare O’Connell Introduced by Suzanne Aspden

The Carnival of the Animals
Sheldonian Theatre 2:00pm Sun 7 Sunday, 7 November 2021 See this event

Festival information:

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.

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.

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.

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.