QPAC

Discover the secret power of words

Pip Williams’ award-winning New York Times bestseller The Dictionary of Lost Words is brought to vivid life in this wildly popular stage adaptation by Verity Laughton. “Filled with humour and historical awareness” (Broadway World) and expertly directed by Jessica Arthur, it’s no wonder this play has become a runaway success.

It’s 1886 and the very first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary is being compiled. Four-year-old Esme Nicoll has a front row seat. Well, she’s hiding under the sorting table, anyway. As her father and his male colleagues decide which words stay and which go, Esme collects the discarded scraps to compile her own far more magical dictionary. A sweeping historical tale, The Dictionary of Lost Words follows Esme from her childhood in the 1880s, into adulthood at the height of the women’s suffrage movement and the beginning of the First World War.

This beloved modern classic, featuring Kathryn Adams, Arkia Ashraf, Ksenja Logos, Brian Meegan, Johnny Nasser, Angela Nica Sullen, Shannen Alyce Quan and James Smith, is a beautiful and transportive reflection on the love between a daughter and her father and a spellbinding night of theatre.

A best-selling multi-award winner (including the People’s Choice Award at the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards) and chosen for the Reese Witherspoon Book Club, the book has been lauded as an “absorbing, quietly revolutionary novel”, “deeply, intrinsically kind [and] a profoundly comforting place to dwell” (The Age) and “a captivating and slyly subversive fictional paean to the real women whose work on the Oxford English Dictionary went largely unheralded” (New York Times).