Alice in Wonderland show closes festival

Tickets available for festival closing dinner

A unique family performance, Welcome to Wonderland, to celebrate 150 years since publication of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland will close this year's FT Weekend Oxford Literary Festival. Musicians Ashley Wass and Matthew Trusler will perform original pieces commissioned from leading composers and an actor will read a script written by the author of Captain Corelli's Mandolin, Louis de Bernières, Tickets are now also available for the closing festival dinner. The evening's speaker is historian and broadcaster Diarmaid MacCulloch, who will talk about his forthcoming BBC series, Sex and the West. This year's programme is now complete, with more than 250 events available to book on the website or at the box office in Blackwell's bookshop, Oxford (Mon-Sun 10am-6pm 0870 343 1001).

2023

2022

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.

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.

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.