1960 — Oulipo founded as the Séminaire de littérature expéri- mentale. Name formally amended to Ouvroir de littérature potentielle at the group’s second meeting.
1961 — First Manifesto.
1965 — Publication of The Blue Flowers by Raymond Queneau.
1967 — Jacques Roubaud becomes first co-opted member of the Oulipo.
1967 — George Perec joins the Oulipo.
1969 — Publication of A Void by Georges Perec.
1973 — Second Manifesto.
1973 — Italo Calvino joins the Oulipo.
1973 — Harry Mathews becomes the first American member of the Oulipo.
1973 — Publication of La Littérature potentielle, a collection of representative Oulipian work, brings the group its first broad exposure.
1975 — Publication of The Sinking of the Odradek Stadium by Harry Mathews.
1976 — Death of Oulipo co-founder Raymond Queneau.
1976 — The Oulipo hosts its first annual summer workshop, at a Carthusian monastery in Villeneuve-lès-Avignon in the south of France.
1978 — Publication of Life A User’s Manual by Georges Perec.
1978 — Jacques Roubaud abandons his book The Great Fire of London, leading him to begin his masterwork, a seven- book project called “the great fire of London.”
1979 — Publication of If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler by Italo Calvino.
1982 — Death of Georges Perec.
1984 — Death of François Le Lionnais, co-founder and president of the Oulipo. Succeeded by Noël Arnaud.
1984 — Julio Cortázar dies in Paris after repeatedly declining invitations to join the Oulipo.
1985 — Death of Italo Calvino.
1986 — Anne Garréta publishes Sphinx (Grasset), a novel which tells the love story of two characters whose genders are unclear (a difficult feat in the highly gendered French language).
1986 — Warren Motte publishes Oulipo: A Primer of Potential Literature.
1986 — Marcel Bénabou publishes Why I Have Not Written Any of My Books.
1987 — Publication of Cigarettes by Harry Mathews.
1990 — Founding member Jean Queval dies.
1990 — OuCuiPo (Workshop of Potential Cuisine) is founded.
1991 — OuTraPo (Workshop of Potential Tragicomedy) is founded.
1992 — Jacques Roubaud publishes “Le voyage d’hier ” (“Yesterday’s Journey”), which builds on and transform’s Perec’s “Le voyage d’hiver ” (“The Winter Journey”).
1992 — Hervé Le Tellier conscripted into the group.
1992 — Oskar Pastior joins the group (its first and only Romanian).
1992 — Pierre Rosenstiehl joins the group.
1992 — OuBaPo (Workshop of Potential Comic Books) is founded.
1993 — Jacques Jouet publishes Le chant d’amour grand-singe (The Great-Ape Love-Song), a series of poems composed in a language from the Tarzan series called Great-Ape.
1993 — OuHisPo (Workshop of Potential History) is founded.
1995 — Bernard Cerquiligni joins the group after publishing L’Accent du souvenir, an autobiography of the circumflex.
1995 — Michelle Grangaud joins the group, partly on the basis of her poetry collection Stations (1990), composed entirely of anagrams created from the names of Parisian metro stops.
1995 — OuPhoPo (Workshop for Potential Photography) is founded.
1996 — Beginning of the Thursday readings.
1996 — Jacques Jouet composes his metro poems.
1997 — OuCiPo (Workshop of Potential Cinema) is founded.
1998 — Publication of the Oulipo Compendium by Harry Mathews and Alastair Brotchie.
1998 — Ian Monk is elected to the Oulipo.
2000 — Olivier Salon is elected to the Oulipo.
2000 — Anne Garréta is elected to the Oulipo: born in 1962, she is the first Oulipian to be younger than the group itself.
2001 — The Magazine Littéraire devotes its May issue to the Oulipo.
2001 — OuGraPo (Workshop for Potential Graphic Design) is founded.
2001 — André Blavier, elected to the group in 1961, dies. The group’s “foreign correspondent,” he lived in Belgium.
2001 — Death of founding member Jacques Bens.
2001 — OuArchPo (Workshop of Potential Architecture) is founded.
2001 — OuPolPo (Workshop of Potential Politics) is founded.
2001 — Michelle Métail tries to leave the group and requests that her name be replaced on the roster with an ellipsis. (Her request was refused.)
2002 — A rival OuGraPo (Workshop for Potential Grammar) is founded.
2002 — Death of founding member Claude Berge.
2003 — The systems analyst Valérie Baudoin is elected to the group.
2003 — OuMuPo (Workshop of Potential Music).
2003 — Noël Arnaud dies. Paul Fournel is elected president, leaving his position of “definitively provisory secretary” to Marcel Bénabou, who adds it to his prior position of “provisionally definitive secretary.”
2005 — Death of Jean Lescure.
2005 — Frédéric Forte joins the group after publishing Opéras- Minute.
2005 — Oulipo symposium is held at Princeton University.
2005 — nOulipo conference is held at Stanford University.
2006 — Death of Oskar Pastior.
2006 — McSweeney’s publishes The State of Constraint: New Work by Oulipo.
2009 — Hervé Le Tellier publishes Esthétique de l’Oulipo.
2007 — Harry Mathews is interviewed in The Paris Review’s The Art of Fiction series.
2007 — Ian Monk publishes Plouk Town, which Daniel Levin Becker calls “the most significant work the Oulipo has produced since the mid-1990s”
2008 — Death of François Caradec.
2009 — Daniel Levin Becker, the second American and youngest Oulipian, joins the group.
2009 — Michèle Audin joins the group.
2009 — The Oulipo pretty much takes over the first installment of the literary festival Paris en Toutes Lettres.
2013 — OuFrancoPo (Workshop of Potential James Franco) is founded.
2014 — Tom McCarthy joins the group.
2014 — Hervé Le Tellier, helped by Anne Garréta, Michelle Grangaud, Valérie Baudoin and Michèle Audin, writes a feminist manifesto.
2014 — After several false starts, OuPornPo is founded.
2015 — OuBrekPo (Workshop of Potential Breakfasts) is founded.
2015 — Jacques Roubaud wins the Nobel Prize for Literature.
2016 — Oulipo opens for Penn & Teller.
2017 — Christian Bök realizes a longstanding dream by eliciting the spontaneous creation of poetry from inorganic matter.
2020 — After much inquiry and consternation, computational assistance from Google allows the discovery of the hidden e in A Void.
2025 — Original, subsequently authenticated copy of The Winter Journey, publication date 1852, turns up in an Argentine book store.