Update: 31 August 2025 | Slightly Foxed Readers’ Day 2025 has sold out. Please email Edie in the SF office to be added to the waiting list: [email protected]
*NB Tickets are non-refundable. If you have booked and are no longer able to attend Readers’ Day, please contact the Slightly Foxed office as soon as possible: [email protected] / +44 (0) 20 7033 0258. If we are able to resell your ticket, we will be able to refund you.
Over the years Slightly Foxed has come to seem more like a club of people who love books than just a magazine. This is always very noticeable at our annual Readers’ Day – our one-day literary festival – a high point in the Slightly Foxed calendar, to which some of you come year after year to meet the staff and listen to some of our contributors and friends speak about a wide range of books, authors and other bookish subjects.
Slightly Foxed Readers’ Day 2025 will be held on Saturday 8 November at our usual London haunt, the Art Workers’ Guild on Queen Square in Bloomsbury, a short walk from Russell Square and Holborn tube stations. Tickets include a glass of Madeira and a slice of fruit cake, and a goody bag
MAGGIE FERGUSSON | Through Thick and Thin
Maggie Fergusson first encountered Gerard Manley Hopkins on a glorious spring day when she was 7 or maybe 8. She reflects on how, in the half-century since then, the priest-poet has remained a stalwart companion through thick and thin
TIM KENDALL | Literary Letters
In 1953, William Golding’s novel Lord of the Flies was rescued from a slush pile of unsolicited manuscripts by Charles Monteith, a young editor at the publishing house Faber & Faber. It went on to sell over 25 million copies. Over the next forty years Monteith worked closely with Golding on every one of his novels. Tim Kendall draws on letters from both public and private archives to reveal the relationship between one of the greatest novelists of the twentieth century and his publisher.
CATHERINE COLDSTREAM | Cloistered
After the shock of her father’s death, and with the rest of her family scattered, Catherine Coldstream was left grieving and alone at 24. A search for meaning led her to the nuns of the (pseudonymous) Akenside Priory. Here she found peace in a dedicated and tight-knit community. But as she surrendered to her final vows, all was not as it seemed. Catherine will be talking to Maggie Fergusson, deputy and literary editor of The Tablet, about her life as a nun in the 1990s and the dramatic events that led to her flight from the enclosed world.
ALEXANDRA HARRIS | Lives in a Sussex Landscape
When Alexandra Harris returned to her childhood home of West Sussex, she realized that she barely knew the place. As she probed beneath the surface, excavating layers of archival records and everyday objects, hundreds of unexpected stories emerged from the area’s past, dating from the prehistoric era to the Second World War. These electrifying encounters inspired her, in her book The Rising Down, to imagine lives that, though seemingly distant, are deeply connected through this shared landscape.
SARAH ANDERSON & MARTIN LATHAM | The Bookseller’s Tale
Doesn’t everyone dream of working in a bookshop? Two people who have spent their lives in bookselling tell it as it really is. Martin Latham, the longest-serving employee of Waterstones, uncovers the curious history of our book obsession – and his own – while Sarah Anderson explains how she set up the Travel Bookshop and how a single film, Notting Hill, changed everything.
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