Four talks starting at 10am

10am: Alice’s Nightmare in Wonderland: an innovative adventure gamebook with a dangerous twist from Jon Green
11am: Alice in Guinness-time: a 1960s’ advertising campaign using Lewis Carroll’s characters from Brian Sibley
1pm: Alice in Fashion-land: over a century of changing trends and designs inspired by Wonderland by Kiera Vaclavik
2pm: Timeless Alice: adventures in modernity: from the fourth dimension to climate change by Franziska Kohlt

As part of our Travel Series Talks this July, we are delighted to welcome Jonathan Lorie to discuss his new book ‘The Travel Writer’s Way’ and share an insider’s tips on how to write travel.

‘The Travel Writer’s Way’ takes a ground-breaking approach to the craft of travel writing, with a 12-step programme of ‘creative journeys’ specially tailored to develop your writing skills. Whether you want to write for pleasure or for publication, for friends or for the wider world, you’ll find this book as inspiring as it is useful.

It also contains invaluable advice from forty of the world’s top travel-writing experts, who are some of the finest travel writers, editors and bloggers, featuring acclaimed experts such as Paul Theroux, Levison Wood and Sara Wheeler. Furthermore, there is practical information on establishing your blog, writing your book and submitting your articles to travel editors.

Jonathan Lorie has more than 20 years’ experience as travel writer, travel-magazine editor and travel-writing tutor.

This is a free event, but please do register your intent to attend. For more information, please contact our Customer Service Desk on 01865 333 623 or email events.oxford@blackwell.co.uk

For this event, 12 artists from all over the country will be presenting work that they have been making as part of the Sound Diaries open call.

The presenting artists are:

Richard Bentley, Hannah Dargavel-Leafe, Aisling Davis, Atilio Doreste, Marlo De Lara, Beth Shearsby, Kathryn Tovey, Jacek Smolicki, James Green, Lucia Hinojosa, Sena Karahan, Fi.Ona

Sound Diaries expands awareness of the roles of sound and listening in daily life. The project explores the cultural and communal significance of sounds and forms a research base for projects executed both locally and Internationally, in Beijing, Brussels, Tallinn, Cumbria and rural Oxfordshire.

As part of our Let’s Discuss series, we’re proud to be welcoming international speaker, change-maker and global Sharing Economy expert, Benita Matofska and photographer with purpose Sophie Sheinwald, to Oxford for the launch of their new book ‘Generation Share: The change-makers building the Sharing Economy’. Benita and Sophie will dispel the myths surrounding the Sharing Economy, going beyond the big corporates to delve into the wider social and environmental impacts of sharing; from human milk banks saving the lives of premature and sick babies, to social enterprises crowdfunding employment for the homeless and food sharing that is taking people out of food poverty. Benita’s research for Generation Share evidences how the Sharing Economy is saving millions of lives. Expect a lively discussion about this 21st century phenomenon that is changing the way we think, live and do business.

This event is free but do please register your interest in advance, For all enquiries, please email events.oxford@blackwell.co.uk or call our Customer Service Department on 01865 333623.

Blackwell’s is pleased to be hosting the launch of Lisa Cybaniak’s, Survivor to Warrior.

Synopsis
As a survivor of ten years of child abuse, Lisa gently walks you through effective strategies to help you reframe your experiences and reconnect with your Higher Self to help you rebuild your life on your own terms.

Lisa Cybaniak is a Transformational NLP Coach and Child Abuse Survivor. Survivor to Warrior is her first book and is published by Conscious Dreams Publishing.

This event is free but please do register if you plan on attending. There will be complimentary food and drink available on the evening, as well as the opportunity to network and get your book signed by the author. For more information please contact our Customer Service Department on 01865 333 623 or email events.oxford@blackwell.co.uk

Blackwell’s are delighted to be hosting a very special event at the Sheldonian Theatre with Alain de Botton on The School of Life: An Emotional Education.

We spend years in school learning facts and figures but the one thing we’re never taught is how to live a fulfilled life. That’s why we need The School of Life – a real organisation founded ten years ago by writer and philosopher Alain de Botton, an organisation which has one simple aim: to equip people with the tools to survive and thrive in the modern world. And the most important of these tools is emotional intelligence.

The School of Life is nothing short of a crash course in emotional maturity. With all the trademark wit and elegance of Alain de Botton’s other writings, and rooted in practical, achievable advice, it shows us a path to the better lives we all want and deserve.

Blackwell’s are delighted to announce that poet and author Lemn Sissay will be with us, in conversation with Derek Owusu, to discuss his new memoir, My Name is Why.

How does a government steal a child and then imprison him? How does it keep it a secret? This story is how.

At the age of seventeen, after a childhood in a foster family followed by six years in care homes, Norman Greenwood was given his birth certificate. He learned that his real name was not Norman. It was Lemn Sissay. He was British and Ethiopian. And he learned that his mother had been pleading for his safe return to her since his birth.

This is Lemn’s story: a story of neglect and determination, misfortune and hope, cruelty and triumph.

Sissay reflects on his childhood, self-expression and Britishness, and in doing so explores the institutional care system, race, family and the meaning of home. Written with all the lyricism and power you would expect from one of the nation’s best-loved poets, this moving, frank and timely memoir is the result of a life spent asking questions, and a celebration of the redemptive power of creativity.

Lemn Sissay is a BAFTA-nominated, award-winning international writer and broadcaster. He has authored collections of poetry and plays. His Landmark poems are visible in London, Manchester, Huddersfield and Addis Ababa. He has been made an Honorary Doctor by the universities of Manchester, Kent, Huddersfield and Brunel. Sissay was awarded an MBE for services to literature and in 2019 he was awarded the PEN Pinter Prize. He is Chancellor of the University of Manchester. He is British and Ethiopian.

Derek Owusu is a writer and co-host of the literary podcast, Mostly Lit. He also mentors young people at Urban Synergy, an award winning early intervention mentoring charity that helps over 1,000 young people between 11-18 years of age . Derek edited and contributed to the book Safe: On Black British Men Reclaiming Space (2019).

Tickets for this event cost £5. Doors open at 6.45pm at which time there will be a small bar available for the purchasing of drinks. For more information please contact our Customer Service Desk on 01865 333 623 or email events.oxford@blackwell.co.uk.

Architectural historian Professor James Stevens Curl is best known as the Editor of the Oxford Dictionary of Architecture. He also has uncompromising views on modern architecture which he sets out in his latest book, Making dystopia. Tonight’s talk for Oxford Civic Society marks his return to Oxford where he was the Society’s first Chairman in 1969. His talk is part of the Society’s 50th anniversary celebrations.

Short Stories Aloud is back for the autumn! Listen to actors read short stories read by our guest authors. This month we are joined by Joanna Kavenna, author of Zed, and Brian Catling, the Vorrh Trilogy and Earwig . After hearing short stories (and eating some cake) there will be questions from Sarah Franklin, author of Shelter, and the audience. Join us for a wonderful evening, not to be missed.

Zed

Self-anointed guru of the Digital Age, Guy Matthias, CEO of Beetle, has become one of the world’s most powerful and influential figures. Untaxed and ungoverned, his trans-Atlantic company essentially operates beyond the control of Governments or the law.

But trouble is never far away, and for Guy a perfect storm is brewing: his wife wants to leave him, fed up with his serial infidelities; malfunctioning Beetle software has led to some unfortunate deaths which are proving hard to cover up; his longed for deal with China is proving troublingly elusive and, among other things, the mystery hacker, Gogol, is on his trail.

With the clock ticking- Guy, his aide Douglas Varley, Britain’s flailing female PM, conflicted national security agent Eloise Jayne, depressed journalist David Strachey, and Gogol, whoever that may be – the question is becoming ever more pressing, how do you live in reality when nobody knows anything, and all knowledge, all certainty, is partly or entirely fake?

Joanna Kavenna grew up in various parts of Britain, and has also lived in the USA, France, Germany, Scandinavia and the Baltic States. Her first book The Ice Museum was about travelling in the North. Her second book, a novel called Inglorious, won the Orange Prize for New Writing. Kavenna’s writing has appeared in the London Review of Books, the Guardian and Observer, the Times Literary Supplement, the International Herald Tribune, the Spectator and the Telegraph, among other publications. She has held writing fellowships at St Antony’s College, Oxford and St John’s College, Cambridge. She currently lives in the Duddon Valley, Cumbria.

Earwig

Not since Edgar Allan Poe and the Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita has there been such a masterly tale of feline evil.

Earwig got his nickname from his grandfather.

At the start of this story he is employed to look after a strange little girl in a flat in Liege. He spies on her, listens to her by holding a glass up to the wall.

But he never touches her except when, as part of his duties, he is required to is to make teeth of ice and insert them in her gums.

Earwig takes a rare day off, which he spends drinking by himself in Au Metro, a seedy bar full of drunks, dancers and eccentrics. It is St Martin’s day and in the evening as crowds parade through the street carrying lanterns through the snow, he is drawn reluctantly into a conversation with a sinister stranger called Tyre. As a result Earwig accidentally maims a waitress with a broken bottle. He understands that on some level Tyre meant this to happen.

Shortly afterwards a black cat is delivered to the flat, unasked for. The girl forms an immediate bond with it, but Earwig identifies it as the enemy.

Travelling across country by train, transporting the girl and her black cat, Earwig is increasingly caught up in a web of unfortunate and increasingly violent coincidences.

Brian Catling is an English sculptor, poet, novelist, film maker and performance artist. He was educated at North East London Polytechnic and the Royal College of Art. He now holds the post of Professor of Fine Art at The Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art, Oxford and is a fellow of Linacre College. He has previously written The Vorrh trilogy and Only the Lowly, a collection of short stories.

Tickets for this event cost £5. Doors will open at 6.45pm and there will be a small bar available to purchase drinks. For more information, please contact our customer service desk on 01865 333 623 or email events.oxford@blackwell.co.uk.

Blackwell’s are delighted to be hosting economics commentator Grace Blakeley, in conversation with Aaron Bastani, on her new book Stolen, a readable polemic on the growing dominance of the finance industry over the UK economy, and what the left can do to challenge it.

For decades, it has been easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.

In the decade leading up to the 2008 financial crisis, booming banks, rising house prices and cheap consumer goods propped up living standards in the rich world. Thirty years of rocketing debt and financial wizardry had masked the deep underlying fragility of finance-led growth, and in 2008 we were forced to pay up.

The decade since has witnessed all kinds of morbid symptoms, as all around the rich world, wages and productivity are stagnant, inequality is rising, and ecological systems are collapsing.

Stolen is a history of finance-led growth and a guide as to how we might escape it. We’ve sat back as financial capitalism has stolen our economies, our environment and even the future itself. Now, we have an opportunity to change course. What happens next is up to us.

Grace Blakeley is economics commentator at the New Statesman and research fellow at the Institute of Public Policy Research (IPPR). She has written on economic issues for, amongst others, the Independent, and Novara Media, and has appeared on BBC News, the Today Programme, ITV Granada Debate, and Newsnight.

Aaron Bastani is a Senior Editor and co-founder of Novara Media. He has a PhD in media and politics and his new book Fully Automated Luxury Communism was published by Verso earlier this year.

Tickets for this event cost £5. Doors will open at 6.45pm at which time there will be a small bar available for purchasing drinks. For more information, please contact our Customer Service Department on 01865 333 623 or email events.oxford@blackwell.co.uk.

St Peter’s College welcomes you to a talk about Lord Nuffield, a leading figure in St Peter’s early history.

William Morris, Lord Nuffield, probably did more than any other individual to transform Oxford in the twentieth century, physically, economically and socially. His success as an industrialist allowed him to become one of Britain’s most generous benefactors; he gave away the equivalent of £1.5 billion in today’s money, to causes including health, education and academic research. This talk looks specifically at Lord Nuffield’s vital support to various Oxford colleges, including the saving of St Peter’s from closure, andhttps://interestingtalks.in/Oxford/# the founding of the college which bears his name, Nuffield College. It also explores his complex and sometimes difficult relationship with the university.

St Peter’s College Chapel
Free to attend
All welcome

This year marks the 50th Anniversary of humanity first landing on the moon. To celebrate this Oliver Morton will be here at Blackwell’s, in conversation with Caspar Henderson, to discuss his new book, The Moon: A History for the Future.

Every generation has looked up from the Earth and wondered at the beauty of the Moon. 50 years ago, a few Americans became the first to do the reverse-with the whole world watching through their eyes. In this short but wide-ranging book, Oliver Morton explores the history and future of humankind’s relationship with the Moon. A counterpoint in the sky, it has shaped our understanding of the Earth from Galileo to Apollo. Its gentle light has spoken of love and loneliness; its battered surface of death and the cosmic. For some, it is a future on which humankind has turned its back. For others, an adventure yet to begin. Advanced technologies, new ambitions and old dreams mean that men, women and robots now seem certain to return to the Moon. What will they learn there about the universe, the Earth-and themselves? And, this time, will they stay?

Oliver Morton is Environment Editor of the Economist, having formerly been Chief News Editor of Nature and Editor-in-Chief of Wired. He is the author of Mapping Mars: Science, Imagination, and the Birth of a World and Eating the Sun: How Light Powers the Planet and has written for many publications, including Nature, the Independent, National Geographic, the New Yorker, Newsweek, Prospect, and Wired. Asteroid 10716 Olivermorton is named for him.

Caspar Henderson is a writer and journalist. His work has appeared in the Financial Times, the Guardian, the Independent, New Scientist, the New York Review of Books, and other publications. From 2002 to 2005 he was a senior editor at OpenDemocracy. He received the Roger Deakin Award from the Society of Authors in 2009 and the Royal Society of Literature Jerwood Award in 2010. He is the author of ‘The Book of Barely Imagined Beings’, a bestiary for the 21st Century, which was shortlisted for the 2013 Royal Society Winton Prize for Science Books.

This is a free event, but please do register if you plan on attending. The event will take place in our Philosophy Department, which is accessible via a short flight or stairs. Seat are allocated on a first come, first served basis. For more information please contact our Customer Service Desk on 01865 333 623 or email events.oxford@blackwell.co.uk

Lady Margaret Hall and Blackwell’s: Celebrating 140 years

Blackwell’s opened its doors on January 1st 1879 on Broad Street, Oxford and have been trading continuously from there ever since. Since then they have grown to become more than just one bookshop, with a chain of 40 bookshops serving not only individual customers but also a host of libraries, universities, businesses and government departments.

In October 1879 LMH opened its doors to the first nine women students under the Principalship of Elizabeth Wordsworth. Since that very moment they have been leading change in Oxford, being the first women’s College to make the decision to admit men as both students and Fellows from 1979, and in 2016 welcomed the first students of their pioneering Foundation Year to the College. The University of Oxford have recently announced Foundation Oxford, based on LMH’s model.

To celebrate this anniversary, author and LMH alumna (1964 Modern Languages) Professor Dame Marina Warner will ask “Why words matter: The life of stories in dislocated times”. Marina Warner will talk about literature as border crossing, a site of exchange, and a way of making a community of fate.

Marina Warner is a writer of fiction, criticism and history; her works include novels and short stories as well as studies of art, myths, symbols and fairytales.

Tickets for this event are free to alumni of Lady Margaret Hall. For your free ticket, please contact the LMH Almuni Engagement Officer, Emma Farrant at alumni.officer@lmh.ox.ac.uk. Tickets are available to the public at a cost of £5. The event will be followed by a short drinks reception. For more information please contact our Customer Service Desk on 01865 333 623 or email events.oxford@blackwell.co.uk

Photo credit: Carolina Mazzolari

As part of our 140th Anniversary celebrations, Blackwell’s are delighted to be joined by Mark Williams and Danny Penman to discuss Mindfulness: A Practical Guide to Finding Peace in a Frantic World, a book which has been a bestseller across the company since its publication in 2011.

THE LIFE-CHANGING BESTSELLER – OVER 1.5 MILLION COPIES SOLD

Authoritative, beautifully written and much-loved by its readers, Mindfulness: A Practical Guide to Finding Peace in a Frantic World has become a word-of-mouth bestseller and global phenomenon. It reveals a set of simple yet powerful practices that you can incorporate into daily life to break the cycle of anxiety, stress unhappiness and exhaustion. It promotes the kind of happiness that gets into your bones and allows you to meet the worst that life throws at you with new courage.

Mindfulness is based on mindfulness-based cognitive therapy (MBCT). Co-developed by Professor Mark Williams of Oxford University, MBCT is recommended by the UK’s National Institute for Health and Care Excellence and is as effective as drugs for preventing depression. But, equally, it works for the rest of us who aren’t depressed but who are struggling to keep up with the relentless demands of the modern world.

By investing just a few minutes each day, this classic guide to mindfulness will put you back in control of your life once again.

Professor Mark Williams is Professor of Clinical Psychology and Wellcome Trust Principal Research Fellow at the University of Oxford. He co-developed MBCT, is Director of the Oxford Mindfulness Centre, and is co-author of the international best-seller The Mindful Way Through Depression. He is one of the premier researchers in the field of mindfulness worldwide, and has been a pioneer in its development and dissemination.

Dr Danny Penman is a qualified meditation teacher and award-winning writer and journalist. He currently writes features for the UK Daily Mail, having previously worked for the BBC, New Scientist and the Independent newspaper. He is co-author of the international bestseller Mindfulness: A Practical Guide to Finding Peace in a Frantic World. He has received journalism awards from the RSPCA and the Humane Society of the United States. In 2014, he won the British Medical Association’s Best Book (Popular Medicine) Award for Mindfulness for Health: A Practical Guide to Relieving Pain, Reducing Stress and Restoring Wellbeing (co- written with Vidyamala Burch). His books have been translated into more than 25 languages.

This event will consist of a short presentation on mindfulness followed by the authors in conversation with our Sales Development Manager Zool Verjee before taking questions from the audience. It is free to attend, but please do register. The talk will be taking place in the Philosophy Department which is accessible via a short flight of stairs. For more information, please contact our Customer Service Department on 01865 333 623 or email events.oxford@blackwell.co.uk.

Blackwell’s are delighted to welcome to the shop Joanna Cannon who will be in conversation with Lucy Atkins on her new memoir Breaking and Mending: A junior doctor’s stories of compassion and burnout.

The unforgettable memoir from the bestselling author of The Trouble with Goats and Sheep and Three Things About Elsie

‘A few years ago, I found myself in A&E. I had never felt so ill. I was mentally and physically broken. So fractured, I hadn’t eaten properly or slept well, or even changed my expression for months. I sat in a cubicle, behind paper-thin curtains and I shook with the effort of not crying. I was an inch away from defeat… but I knew I had to carry on. Because I wasn’t the patient. I was the doctor.’

No sleep, skeleton support, a head full of anatomy lectures and idealism: this is life for our junior doctors in their first few years on the wards. Here, Joanna Cannon tells her own story in visceral, heart-rending snapshots. We walk with her, facing extraordinary and daunting moments and meeting her patients: from attending her first post-mortem, learning the overwhelming power of a well or badly chosen word, sitting with a young woman in her final hours, to small sustaining acts of kindness and connection.

These moments teach her that emotional care can be just as critical as restoring a heartbeat – and eventually lead her to her true home in psychiatry. Deeply moving, warm, compassionate and beautifully written, Breaking & Mending shows us why we need to better care for mental health – and for those who care for us.

Joanna Cannon worked as a psychiatrist and wrote her bestselling debut novel, The Trouble with Goats and Sheep, in NHS hospital carparks during her lunchbreaks. In 2017, she delivered the Royal College of Psychiatrists’ President’s Lecture. Though she returns to the wards as a volunteer with the NHS Arts for Health programme, Joanna is now a full-time writer and in 2018 her second novel, Three Things about Elsie, also became a bestseller and was longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction.

Lucy Atkins is the award winning author of The Night Visitor, The Missing One and The Other Child. She has also written widely on health issues, including The Cancer Survivor’s Companion and How to Feel Better. Lucy is a critic and journalist and is based in Oxford.

Tickets for this event are £5. Doors will open at 6.45pm when there will be a small bar available to purchase drinks. For more information, please contact our Customer Service Desk on 01865 333 623 or email events.oxford@blackwell.co.uk

Blackwell’s is delighted to be hosting an event with Philip Pullman at the Sheldonian Theatre to celebrate the launch of The Secret Commonwealth: The Book of Dust Volume Two. The event will be recorded live for the Penguin Podcast.

The Secret Commonwealth: The Book of Dust Volume Two is a timely exploration of what it is to be human, to grow up and make sense of the world around us, from one of the UK’s greatest writers. It opens seven years after readers left Lyra Silvertongue and Will Parry on a park bench in Oxford’s Botanic Gardens in The Amber Spyglass, the final book in the His Dark Materials sequence. Lyra Silvertongue is now a 20-year-old Oxford student, about to embark on an epic journey across Europe and into Asia as she seeks out an elusive town said to be haunted by dæmons. Commenting on the plot earlier this year, Pullman said: “Things have been biding their time, waiting for the right moment to reveal their consequences for Lyra Silvertongue. The Secret Commonwealth tells the continuing story of the impact on Lyra’s life of the search for, and the fear of, Dust.”

This is one of only two author events this autumn to mark publication of this highly-anticipated book, and the only one to take place in Philip Pullman – and Lyra’s – hometown. There will be signed copies of The Secret Commonwealth available to purchase at the event, or as part of a book and ticket bundle, as well as a special independents’ edition of the book, priced £20 and featuring a frontispiece illustration by Chris Wormell and bespoke endpapers.

Philip Pullman is one of the most highly respected children’s authors writing today. Winner of many prestigious awards, including the Carnegie of Carnegies and the Whitbread Award, Pullman’s epic fantasy trilogy His Dark Materials has been acclaimed as a modern classic. It has sold 17.5 million copies worldwide and been translated into 40 languages. In 2005 he was awarded the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award. He lives in Oxford.

Tickets for this event are £10, or £25 for the book and ticket bundle. For more information please contact our Customer Service Department on 01865 333 623 or email events.oxford@blackwell.co.uk.

The poppy as a recurring image in poetry and art, and as a symbol of wartime loss, is powerfully resonant in our culture. Dr Andrew Lack, Senior Lecturer in Environmental Biology at Oxford Brookes University, will talk about the poppy plant and its ancient and more recent historical associations.

Tenor Mark Padmore is preparing to take on the role of Aschenbach in David McVicar’s production of Benjamin Britten’s Death in Venice at the Royal Opera House. Join Mark and a panel of experts, including Colin Matthews, Ray Ockenden, John Hopkins, Henry Bacon, and Philip Bullock to explore this many-faceted character through literature, film, and opera.

Marking 70 years of Nineteen Eighty-Four. An interdisciplinary symposium involving Joshua Dienstag, political scientist from UCLA; political historian Greg Claeys (RHUL); literary scholars Anna Vaninskaya (Edinburgh) and Nathan Waddell (Birmingham); novelist Joanna Kavenna; Dorian Lynskey, journalist and author of the recently published Ministry of Fear; Jean Seaton, media historian who runs the Orwell Prize among other things; and Victoria Bateman (the so-called ‘Naked Economist’) who will be talking about the politics of clothes and the uses of the naked body in political activism.

In this book talk the Author, Carl Benedikt Frey, will discuss how the Industrial Revolution was a defining moment in history, but how few grasped its enormous consequences at the time. Now that we are in the midst of another technological revolution how can the lessons of the past can help us to more effectively face the present?

This talk will be followed by a book sale, signing and drinks reception. All welcome.

We are delighted to announce a very special Philosophy in the Bookshop event to mark our fifth anniversary in the series.

Host Nigel Warburton will be joined by philosopher Philip Goff and author Sir Philip Pullman to discuss the influence that Philosophy (Consciousness and Panpsychism in particular) has had on their respective works. Philip Goff’s new book ‘Galileo’s Error’ and Sir Philip Pullman’s ‘The Book of Dust: The Secret Commonwealth’ are both released in 2019 and will be available to purchase on the day.

This event is FREE to attend and will take place in the Philosophy department in the Norrington Room. Registration MUST be made and proof brought with you on the day to gain access to the seating/viewing area. Seating is very limited and will be available on a first come, first served basis. Please note, this area is only accessible via a small set of stairs. Please note neither of the authors will be signing after the talk.

Please call 01865 333623 if you have any enquiries.

In a talk for Oxford Civic Society, Liz Woolley, and a representative of the company, talk about the history of one of the city’s great family firms. Kingerlee has constructed many of the best known buildings in and around Oxford such as the Jam Factory.

Data-driven micro-targeted campaigns have become a main stable of political strategy. As personal and societal data becomes more accessible, we need to understand how it can be used and mis-used in political campaigns and whether it is relevant to regulate political candidates’ access to data.

This book talk will be followed by a drinks reception and book sale, all welcome

Join Oxford Hospitals Charity in celebrating ten years since the Oxford Heart Centre was first opened.

You will hear from our brilliant clinicians about the difference the new Oxford Heart Centre has made, as well as future developments that will benefit heart and lung patients across Oxfordshire, only possible thanks to your generous donations.

Author Mark Haddon also joins us to tell us about his experience as patient in the John Radcliffe.

The event is free to attend and all are welcome.

This month at Short Stories Aloud you can listen to stories by Sophie Hardach (Confession With Blue Horses) and Fanny Blake (A Summer Reunion) read aloud by trained actors. The authors will then be interviewed by Sarah Franklin (Shelter) before taking questions from the audience.

Confession with Blue Horses

Tobi and Ella’s childhood in East Berlin is shrouded in mystery. Now adults living in London, their past in full of unanswered questions. Both remember their family’s daring and terrifying attempt to escape, which ended in tragedy; but the fall-out from that single event remains elusive. Where did their parents disappear to, and why? What happened to Heiko, their little brother? And was there ever a painting of three blue horses?

In contemporary Germany, Aaron works for the archive, making his way through old files, piecing together the tragic history of thousands of families. But one file in particular catches his eye; and soon unravelling the secrets at its heart becomes an obsession.

When Ella is left a stash of notebooks by her mother, and she and Tobi embark on a search that will take them back to Berlin, her fate clashes with Aaron’s, and together they piece together the details of Ella’s past… and a family destroyed.

Devastating and beautifully written, funny and life-affirming, Confession with Blue Horses explores intimate family life and its strength in the most difficult of circumstances.

Sophie Hardach worked as a correspondent for Reuters news agency in Tokyo, Paris and Milan and has written for a number of publications including the Atlantic, the Guardian and the Daily Telegraph. She has previously written two critically acclaimed novels, The Registrar’s Manual for Detecting Forced Marriages, about Kurdish refugees, and Of Love and Other Wars, about pacifists during World War Two.

A Summer Reunion

One perfect villa, four old friends, and a holiday that will change everything…

Amy, Linda, Kate and Jane were best friends at school. Now, years later, they have grown apart. When Amy discovers her husband has been stealing from her successful interiors business, and with a milestone birthday looming, she decides it is the time to reach out to her old friends once again.

So, she decides to invite the other three to her beautiful villa in Mallorca for a reunion weekend. As the four friends gather, secrets are unearthed, old scores settled and new friendships forged. Will this holiday bring them together or tear them apart? And will each of them grasp their second chance for happiness…?

Fanny Blake was a publisher for many years, editing both fiction and non-fiction before becoming a freelance journalist and writer. She has written various non-fiction titles, as well as acting as ghost writer for a number of celebrities. She was Books Editor of Woman & Home magazine has been a judge for the Costa Novel Award, the British Book Awards, the Comedy Women in Print Award among others. She has written eight novels, including An Italian Summer and A Summer Reunion.

Tickets for this event cost £5. Doors will open at 6.45pm and there will be a small bar available at which to purchase drinks. For more information please call our Customer Service Department on 01865 333 623 or email events.oxford@blackwell.co.uk

For twenty years New York Review Books Classics have been devoted to two causes: discovering important, previously untranslated books from all over the world and rediscovering wonderful books in English that have fallen into undeserved obscurity. Fiction and non-fiction and books in a wide variety of genres can be found among the more than 500 NYRB Classics now in print, and it may be that what, as much as anything, unites the books in the series is that they hail from the past, however remote or recent. What does the past have to say to the present is the question that the series as a whole may be said to raise, and nowadays, when the authority of tradition is diminished and indeed suspect, it is a question of peculiar urgency. How do books haunt us? The novelist Rachel Cusk, the philosopher John Gray, the critic and writer Victoria Nelson, together with the founder and editor of NYRB Classics, Edwin Frank, will discuss.

Edwin Frank was born in Boulder, Colorado and educated at Harvard College and Columbia University. He is the founder of the New York Review Books Classics series, the author of Snake Train: Poems 1984-2013 (Shearsman Books), and the editor of The Red Thread: 20 Years of NYRB Classics (NYRB).

Victoria Nelson is a writer of fiction, criticism and memoir. Her books include Gothicka and The Secret Life of Puppets, a stude of the supernatural grotesque in Western culture that won the Modern Language Association’s Scaglione Prize for Comparative Literary Studes in 2001, and Wild California, a collection of stories. She edited NYRB’s collection of Robert Aickman stories Compulsory Games. She teaches in Goddard College’s MFA creative writing programme.

Rachel Cusk was born in 1967 and is the author of eight novels: Saving Agnes, which won the Whitbread First Novel Award, The Temporary, The Country Life, which won a Somerset Maugham Award, The Lucky Ones, which was shortlisted for the Whitbread Novel Award, In the Fold, Arlington Park, which was shortlisted for the Orange Prize, The Bradshaw Variations and Outline. Her non-fiction books are A Life’s Work, The Last Supper and Aftermath. In 2003 she was chosen as one of Granta’s Best of Young Novelists.

John Gray is an English political philosopher with interests in analytic philosophy and the history of ideas. He retired in 2008 as School Professor of European Thought at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Gray contributes regularly to The Guardian, The Times Literary Supplement and the New Statesman, where he is the lead book reviewer.

Tickets for this event cost £5. Doors will open at 6.45pm, at which time there will be a small bar available from which to purchase drinks. For more information please call our Customer Service Desk on 01865 333 623 or email events.oxford@blackwell.co.uk.

Join Oxford University Press for a special science-themed “speed dating” event. Mingle with a range of topics, including reptiles, psychopathy, environmental law, synaesthesia and circadian rhythms with expert authors from the Very Short Introductions series. Make an impression and get your questions in before the bell rings!

IF Oxford is operating a Pay What You Decide (PWYD) ticketing system. This works by enabling you to pre-book events without paying for a ticket beforehand. Afterwards, you have the opportunity to pay what you decide you want to, or can afford. If you prefer, you can make a donation to IF Oxford when you book. All funds raised go towards next year’s Festival.

We are honoured to announce that Elif Shafak will give this year’s Annual Blackwell’s Lecture on Thursday 24th October 2019 at 7.30pm in the Sheldonian Theatre.

Elif Shafak will deliver this year’s Annual Blackwell’s Lecture on the subject of literature, social change and politics.

Elif Shafak is an award-winning British-Turkish novelist and the most widely read female author in Turkey. She writes in both Turkish and English, and has published seventeen books, eleven of which are novels, including the bestselling ‘The Bastard of Istanbul’, ”The Forty Rules of Love’, and ‘Three Daughters of Eve’. Her latest book is ’10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World.’

Her work has been translated into fifty languages, published by Penguin/Random House and represented by Curtis Brown globally. She was awarded the title of Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres. In 2017 Elif was chosen by Politico as one of the twelve people who would make the world better.

Elif Shafak is also a political scientist and an academic. She holds a degree in International Relations, a masters’ degree in Gender and Women’s Studies and a PhD in Political Science and Political Philosophy. She has taught at various universities in Turkey, the UK and the USA, including St Anne’s College, Oxford University, where she is an honorary fellow.

Elif Shafak is a member of Weforum Global Agenda Council on Creative Economy and a founding member of ECFR (European Council on Foreign Relations). An advocate for women’s rights, LGBT rights and freedom of speech, Shafak is an inspiring public speaker and twice a TED Global speaker, each time receiving a standing ovation.

Her writing has been longlisted for the Orange Prize, MAN Asian Prize; the Baileys Prize and the IMPAC Dublin Award, and shortlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize and RSL Ondaatje Prize. She judged numerous prestigious literary prizes.

Tickets cost just £5 are available from the Blackwell’s Eventbrite website or from Blackwell’s Bookshop, 50 Broad Street, Oxford.

Blackwell’s are delighted to be hosting a celebration in honour of the launch of Matthew Rice’s beautiful new book, Oxford.

Oxford is one of the jewels of European architecture, much loved and much visited. The city offers an unparallelled collection of the best of English building through the centuries. Matthew Rice’s Oxford is a feast of delightful watercolour illustrations and an informed and witty text, explaining how the city came into being and what to look out for today.

While the focus is on architectural detail, Rice also describes how the city has been shaped by its history, most of all by generations of patrons who had the education and the resources to commission work from the greatest architects and builders of their day, an astonishing range of which still stands.

More than anywhere else in England, it is possible in Oxford to take in the history of English architecture simply by walking today’s streets, lanes, parks and meadows.

This is a free event, but please register if you would like to attend. The evening will include a short speech from Matthew Rice, followed by a chance to buy the book, get it signed and then enjoy the evening with the refreshments provided. For more information, please call our Customer Service Desk on 01865 333 623 or email events.oxford@blackwell.co.uk.

Blackwell’s are delighted to be hosting a special Hallowe’en event exploring black magic, with Thomas Waters and Lucie McKnight Hardy as they discuss their books ‘Cursed Britain: A History of Witchcraft and Black Magic in Modern Times’ and ‘Water Shall Refuse Them’.

‘Cursed Britain’

Historian Thomas Waters here explores the lives of cursed or bewitched people, along with the witches and witch-busters who helped and harmed them. Waters takes us on a fascinating journey from Scottish islands to the folklore-rich West Country, from the immense territories of the British Empire to metropolitan London. We learn why magic caters to deep-seated human needs but see how it can also be abused, and discover how witchcraft survives by evolving and changing. Along the way, we examine an array of remarkable beliefs and rituals, from traditional folk magic to diverse spiritualities originating in Africa and Asia.

This is a tale of cynical quacks and sincere magical healers, depressed people and furious vigilantes, innocent victims and rogues who claimed to possess evil abilities. Their spellbinding stories raise important questions about the state’s role in regulating radical spiritualities, the fragility of secularism and the true nature of magic.

Thomas Waters is lecturer in history at Imperial College London and a specialist in the modern history of witchcraft and magic.

‘Water Shall Refuse Them’

The heatwave of 1976. Following the accidental drowning of her sister, sixteen-year-old Nif and her family move to a small village on the Welsh borders to escape their grief. But rural seclusion doesn’t bring any relief. As her family unravels, Nif begins to put together her own form of witchcraft – collecting talismans from the sun-starved land. That is, until she meets Mally, a teen boy who takes a keen interest in her, and has his own secret rites to divulge.

Lucie McKnight Hardy is the debut author of ‘Water Shall Refuse Them’, an atmospheric coming-of-age novel, full of magical suspense.

Tickets cost £5. There will be a bar serving an array of magical potions from 6:45pm – 7pm. Fancy dress is welcomed. For all enquiries please email events.oxford@blackwell.co.uk or call our Customer Service Department on 01865 333623.