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America Programme

Adam Gopnik Interviewed by Sophie Ratcliffe

The Real Work: On the Mystery of Mastery
Blackwell’s bookshop 10:00am Sat 1 Saturday, 1 April 2023 See this event
Leta McCollough Seletzky

The Kneeling Man: The Black Spy Who Witnessed the Assassination of Martin Luther King
Oxford Martin School: Seminar Room 12:00pm Sat 1 Saturday, 1 April 2023 See this event
Catherine Lacey Interviewed by Matthew Stadlen

Biography of X
Lincoln College: Oakeshott Room 12:00pm Sat 1 Saturday, 1 April 2023 See this event
Torie Bosch

You Are Not Expected to Understand This: How 26 Lines of Code Changed the World
Oxford Martin School: Seminar Room 2:00pm Sat 1 Saturday, 1 April 2023 See this event
Eric Collins Interviewed by Matshidiso Mohajane

We Don’t Need Permission: How Black Business can Change our World
Lincoln College: Oakeshott Room 2:00pm Sat 1 Saturday, 1 April 2023 See this event
John Hosler

Jerusalem Falls: Seven Centuries of War and Peace
Lincoln College: Oakeshott Room 4:00pm Sat 1 Saturday, 1 April 2023 See this event
Isabel Wilkerson

American Lecture. Caste: Exposing America’s Invisible Scaffolding
Sheldonian Theatre 4:00pm Sat 1 Saturday, 1 April 2023 See this event
Sarah Churchwell Interviewed by Nick Higham

The Wrath to Come: Gone with the Wind and the lies America Tells
Exeter College: Marquee 6:00pm Sat 1 Saturday, 1 April 2023 See this event

Festival information:

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

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.

The Oxford Literary Festival is intellectual Viagra.

A stimulating and rewarding on-stage conversation; a lively informed and tolerant audience; privileged access to the great treasures of the Bodleian, and finally, wonderfully interesting dinner companions to help me conclude the best day I have enjoyed at any festival – anywhere.

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.

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.