Meeting a need – local literary festivals
In 2025 OxIA’s main innovation was aimed at enabling local communities to engage with the writers in their midst, in the form of two local mini literary festivals, in Headington and Wolvercote, with a book fair in a main hall alongside talks and workshops in a back room. Stalls in the book fairs accommodated authors, poets, publishers, editors – something for readers and writers of all ages and interests.
Talks and Workshop sessions covered discussions of plotting and character-building in crime and thriller writing, the necessity and pitfalls of research in historical fiction, world- building in genre fiction, and the characteristics of a good story in any genre. There were also workshops for children and parents on illustrating and, in collaboration with ARCh (Oxfordshire’s Assisted Reading for Children scheme), writing stories and ‘duologues’.
Feedback from stallholders, speakers and visitors was overwhelmingly positive. The events were well organised, with a ‘buzzy and friendly’ atmosphere that encouraged people to talk openly about books, without any desperate hard-sell feel. Stallholders enjoyed plenty of lively conversation with visitors and fellow exhibitors, and everyone thought the partnership with ARCh was excellent.
One visiting writer commented: ‘Absolutely fabulous - full of the most lovely books and batty people - it gives one hope’. Other visitors loved the layout, vibe, community, sense of creativity, and the profusion of perfect Christmas presents!
The back room sessions went down extremely well. A publisher said: ‘I absolutely LOVED the topics of the talks. Really useful stuff for writers – [other book fairs] could focus more on that kind of thing. If I wasn’t exhibiting, I’d have listened to most of them.’
Most book fairs are all about selling books.
The big literary festivals are all about selling expensive tickets for sessions and selling books.
Visitor entry to our one-day mini literary festivals is free. They are funded by a modest contribution from each stall-holder in the book fair, and are all about readers and writers meeting face to face, and getting to know each other.
In this way, the events fill a need not met by other book fairs and literary festivals, which is why we’re planning two more in 2026 – in Wolvercote, on Sunday 28th June, the final day of the Wolvercote and Wytham Mid-Summer Festival; and in Wallingford, in collaboration with the town council and The Wallingford Book Shop, in late September or early October.