We’re pleased to announce Giuseppe Pezzini as our 2026 annual Guest of Honour.
The Tolkien Society’s Annual Dinner Guest Speaker 2026 will speak on the evening of Saturday 25th April at our event in Manchester which will simultaneously be livestreamed. 
Usually our Guest follows the post-AGM Annual Dinner, and is one of the most prestigious positions within the Tolkien Society’s annual calendar. Our Guests of Honour always do a talk, Q&A session, or, as is often the case with artists, a presentation. Previous guests include Brian Sibley, Priscilla Tolkien, John Garth, Alan Lee, Dimitra Fimi, Tom Shippey and Humphrey Carpenter. The format and the topic is of the speaker’s choosing, but our desire is to share some aspect of current thinking on Tolkien.
Prof. Giuseppe Pezzini is Tutorial Fellow at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, which he joined in 2021, after five beautiful years of teaching in St Andrews (2016–2021), and research fellowships at Magdalen College Oxford (2013–2015) and the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton (2016). He worked as an assistant editor for the Oxford Dictionary of Medieval Latin, and has published especially on Latin language and literature, philosophy of language, the reception of the Classics, and the theory of fiction, ancient and modern. His publications include five books, including a monograph on Tolkien’s theory of fiction (Cambridge University Press 2025), five edited volumes (including two Tolkien-related), and more than fifty peer-reviewed articles. Prof. Pezzini is also the Tolkien Editor for the Journal of Inklings Studies, one the founders of the Oxford Tolkien Network, a research centre based in the University of Oxford, and a member of the Young Academy of Europe.
For more information about Giuseppe, see his profile on the Corpus Christi College, Oxford website. For more information about the AGM, and to book the dinner, look at our event page.
