Writers in Oxford is the society for published writers and authors in Oxford and Oxfordshire. Founded in 1992, it now has around 200 members spread across the city, the county and beyond. Members represent every genre of writing and all media: non-fiction (academic and popular); fiction (contemporary and historical, mysteries); biography, memoir, poetry, children’s, script-writing, journalism.

Our aim is to bring writers together to enjoy each other’s company, network, develop professionally, and enjoy a wide range of literary and other events.

WiO is run on a voluntary basis by a small committee.

Peter Tickler is an established writer of crime fiction, mostly set in and around Oxford. He has been much praised for the authenticity of his Oxford (‘a wonderful gift of creating geographically factual settings for his fictional characters’ – Oxford Times) as well as the pace of his stories (‘deliciously thrilling and wildly unpredictable’ – Oxford Today).

He studied classics at Keble College, and later settled with his wife and family in South Oxford. He worked in the IT dept of the Potato Marking Board in Between Towns Road, and from the computer room he looked down into the carpark of the Cowley police station. So it was inevitable that his irascible protagonist DI Susan Holden was based there. He loves setting his crimes in places he knows, and describes himself as ‘town, not gown’.

His latest (and 10th) crime story is Death in the Sea Pool, set in Bude where he has spent many off-season holidays. He insists that ‘sometimes I need a change of scene!’.

He is a member of the Crime Writers’ Association, and gives talks at festivals, libraries, U3As, Women’s Institutes and even at one of His Majesty’s Prisons. (They let him out eventually!).

His great-grandfather founded Tickler’s Jam Company, which supplied jam to the British troops and became a household name in the First World War. This was the inspiration for his novel The Tickler’s Jam Murders.

Peter Lovesey (winner of 3 CWA daggers) emailed him: “I was bamboozled by the solution to the puzzle. Bravo.”

Steve Sheppard was born and grew up in Surrey before moving to Buckinghamshire and then to Oxfordshire, where he spent a quarter of a century living in an idiosyncratic village that was the affectionate inspiration for his fourth book, Lazytown. He now lives in Hampshire. He spent forty years starting to write books but not finishing them, until belatedly realising that the key is not to give up. The other thing he has since learned is that he should have become a celebrity before writing a book, as this would have made selling it much easier.

False Connections, Steve’s fifth book, was published in June and is the first to be written as a straight thriller and not primarily as a comedy although, don’t worry, there’s still quite a lot of humour in it. He hopes it will be the first of a series featuring feisty, funny but flawed ex-MI5 agent, Mel Milano. He also has three spy thrillers with laughs to his name, all published by Claret Press: A Very Important Teapot (2019), set in Australia, Bored to Death in the Baltics (2021), not set in Australia, and Poor Table Manners (2024), which takes place in Cape Town. These feature an initially fairly hapless hero, Dawson, and a considerably less hapless heroine, Lucy, together with varied supporting casts, most of whom are not who they claim to be. Steve’s fourth book (as mentioned above) is an out-and-out comedy-murder-mystery, Lazytown (2025).

Neil J Hart is a multi-award-winning author writing dystopian fantasy and sci-fi mystery adventure books for fearless readers aged 12 and up. Sail the Endless Blue with Erin and Number Twelve, uncover the power of music, magic, and memory with Sadie and Oliver, and follow Harper Hale as she becomes the first Earthling to enrol at the most dangerous magic school in the galaxy!

Every adventure starts with a single step… Shall we begin?

Pamela Roberts is an award-winning creative producer, historian, author and founder of Black Oxford Untold Stories, a cultural platform dedicated to uncovering, documenting and bringing to wider public attention the histories and contributions of Black scholars at the University of Oxford.

Pamela is also the author of Black Oxford – The Untold Stories of oxford University’s Black Scholars and The Adventures of a Black Edwardian Intellectual: James Arthur Harley.

She is an alumnus of the Eccles Centre for American Studies at the British Library and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and the Royal Historical Society.

I am an author of fiction – literary/commercial/book group fiction that is character driven and I have written four novels with the fifth soon to be published. After a career as a short story writer for women’s magazines, I completed an M.A. in Creative Writing and began to write full length fiction. I am also a tutor and speaker on all things bookish, writerly and readerly!