British Library announces major Agatha Christie exhibition opening October 2026
- maxwell museums
- Sep 21, 2025
- 4 min read
The British Library will stage a blockbuster exhibition dedicated to crime writer Agatha Christie in London from 30 October 2026, marking the 50th anniversary of her death.
The show will be the largest UK exhibition on Christie — who is the world’s best-selling novelist of all time — in over twenty years.
It’ll trace how Christie created iconic characters including Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple, while exploring her life, travels and wide-ranging interests in archaeology and pharmacology.
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Major exhibitions on Christie are surprisingly rare, despite her enduring popularity. In part that’s because her global literary and media rights are tightly controlled by a company Christie herself set up in 1955, 21 years before her death.
For this retrospective, the British Library are working directly with that company — Agatha Christie Limited — and the Christie Archive Trust, which manages and preserves the personal photographs, letters and other family possessions that belonged to the writer.
So while that means curators will have access to an unprecedented range of archival material and more, visitors will have to see for themselves how deferential they are to the Christie, and how much freedom they are given to tell their own version of this story.
Either way, this show will be one of the blockbuster London exhibitions of next year, not least because of her worldwide fame. With over one billion books sold in English and another billion in over 100 languages, she is outsold only by the Bible and Shakespeare.
The British Library will be hoping for a sell-out show, and one that will cement her legacy as a defining figure of 20th century culture.
Personal items on display for the first time
Visitors will be able to view a number of highly personal items thanks to the Library’s collaboration with the Christie Archive. A major highlight will be the Remington typewriter from 1937, believed to have been used to compose 1939’s And Then There Were None, which Christie described as the most difficult of her books to write.
Alongside this will be displays of her notebooks, personal letters and early manuscript drafts, and visitors will also have the chance to listen to Christie’s own voice through her dictaphone recordings.
They can also see other personal objects which provided direct inspiration for her stories and have never been on public display before. These include:
Typescript of House of Beauty, her earliest short story, written as a teenager
Study notes for her 1917 pharmaceutical exam, which informed her detailed use of poisons
Family photographs from Egypt, Hawaii and Southern Africa
Letters to her second husband, including one describing a journey on the Orient Express, a trip which would inspire her most famous work Murder on the Orient Express
Christie’s notes for her stage adaptation of Witness for the Prosecution
Anniversaries shaping the exhibition
The timing of this show coincides with several milestones.
2026 marks 50 years since Christie’s death, in January 1976 at age 85 from natural causes.
It will also be the 100th anniversary of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926), the third and most pivotal Poirot novel, and which the British Crime Writers' Association voted the best crime novel of all time in 2013. It will also be 50 years since the posthumous publication of Sleeping Murder, billed as Miss Marple’s final case.
Agatha Christie’s great-grandson — and CEO and Chairman of Agatha Christie Limited — James Prichard, said he was “delighted to be partnering with the British Library for this major exhibition dedicated to my great grandmother’s extraordinary life and works.”
He added that his father Mathew “has carefully selected a wide range of items from the Christie Archive which offer remarkable insights into Agatha Christie from both a professional, and personal perspective.
“Hers was truly one of the most remarkable lives of the 20th century” he said.
Jamie Andrews, Director of Public Engagement at the British Library, said “the exhibition will take visitors back to Christie’s childhood and explore her journey to becoming an iconic writer, while celebrating how adaptations of her novels for stage and screen continue to enthral audiences today.”
Tickets are not yet on sale, but demand is expected to be high given Christie’s global following and the landmark nature of this show.
And 2026 is shaping up be a year packed with exhibitions dedicated to iconic British female cultural figures. In the spring, Tate Modern host a Tracey Emin retrospective, while the summer sees Barbara Hepworth's colourful sculptures take the spotlight at the Courtauld Gallery.
Agatha Christie will run at the British Library in London from 30 October 2026 until 20 June 2027