Zadie Smith • Tom Holland • Mary Beard • Maggie O’Farrell
Peter Frankopan • Marlon James • Simon Schama • General David Petraeus
Katherine Rundell • Alex Younger • Emily Maitlis • Daniel Finkelstein
Tristram Hunt • Emma Walmsley • Philippe Sands • Jonathan Freedland
Fatima Farheen Mirza • James Marriott • Merve Emre • Olesya Khromeychuk
Nick Laird • David Lammy • William Shawcross • Yana Peel
Marc Quinn • Calder Walton • Naomi Ishiguro • Jonathan Bate
Pauline Neville-Jones • Martha Kearney • Mikhail Zygar • Munira Mirza
Mansoor Abulhoul • Jane Ridley • Hannah Rothschild • Maryam Aslany
Tomiwa Owolade • Camilla Cavendish • Daniel Chandler • Justine Picardie
Tom Crewe • Yonca Dervisoglu • Will Gompertz • Robert Hardman
Alice Thomson • Iona McLaren • Octavius Black • Martin Ivens • Camilla Long
Joanne Cash • Albert Read • Emily Benn • James McAuley • Anne McElvoy
Einat Wilf • Emma Soames • Flora Soames • Andrei Soldatov • Oriole Cullen
Luke Pepera • Jonathan Maxwell • Ed Conway • Con Coughlin • Jake Wallis Simons
and founders Natalie Livingstone, Catherine Ostler, Simon Sebag Montefiore and Andrew Roberts
Saturday 30th September – Sunday 1st October 2023
www.clivedenliteraryfestival.org • @ClivedenLitFest • Images
Taplow, Berkshire. 31 July 2023. Cliveden Literary Festival (30 September – 1 October) is delighted to reveal early highlights from this year’s programme as tickets go on sale from 10am today, Monday 31 July.
Taking place at the historic Cliveden House in Berkshire, this year’s festival features the leading writers and thinkers of today, with speakers including Zadie Smith, Tom Holland, Mary Beard, Maggie O’Farrell, Peter Frankopan and Marlon James.
Described last year by Succession’s Brian Cox as ‘[an] extraordinary environment … I can’t think of anything more perfect’ and author Robert Harris as ‘beautiful … like a rolling intellectual house party to which everyone is invited’, the Cliveden Literary Festival is renowned as a forum for lively discussion, thought-provoking ideas, and political debate.
Now in its seventh year, the festival revives Cliveden House’s rich history as a literary salon frequented by writers and thinkers from Alexander Pope to Alfred Lord Tennyson, George Bernard Shaw, Jonathan Swift and Sir Winston Churchill.
Cliveden Literary Festival is run by a committee of writers and historians – Andrew Roberts, Natalie Livingstone, Catherine Ostler and Simon Sebag Montefiore.
A sell-out success every year, priority bookers were given early access to festival tickets, with the wider public able to book from 10am today, Monday 31 July, on the Cliveden Literary Festival website.
ENDS
For all press enquiries, to request images, interviews or register for a press pass, please contact: Georgina Moore, Edwina Boyd-Gibbins & Jane Lau at Midas: Georgina.Moore@midaspr.co.uk • Edwina.Boyd-Gibbins@midaspr.co.uk • Jane.Lau@midaspr.co.uk
Cliveden Literary Festival will run from 30th September – 1st October 2023
- Press images can be found here
- Follow @ClivedenLitFest on Twitter and #ClivedenLitFest on Twitter and Instagram for further updates
Notes to Editors
About Cliveden Literary Festival
Cliveden Literary Festival launched in 2017. It continues the rich literary heritage of Cliveden House, which has inspired writers and thinkers from Alexander Pope, Alfred Lord Tennyson, George Bernard Shaw and Jonathan Swift to Sir Winston Churchill.
The 2022 programme featured: William Boyd, Tina Brown, Antonia Romeo, Edward Enninful, Brian Cox, Abi Morgan, Ben Okri, Flora Yukhnovich, William Dalrymple, Robert Harris, Jonathan Bate, Jessie Burton, Serhii Plokhy, Sebastian Barry and Mark Galeotti.
Previous speakers at Cliveden Literary Festival include Amor Towles, Emerald Fennell, Chibundu Onuzo, Lionel Shriver, Dan Jones, Kate Mosse, Ian McEwan, Kwasi Kwarteng, Sir Richard Dearlove, Cherie Blair, Armando Iannucci, Niall Ferguson, Alain de Botton, Elif Shafak, Sebastian Faulks, Lady Antonia Fraser, David Baddiel, Lior Raz, Kate Bingham, Stephen Frears, Priti Patel, Hallie Rubenhold, Leila Slimani, Emily Maitlis, Bret Easton Ellis, Professor Brian Cox and Hanif Kureishi.
Follow @ClivedenLitFest on Twitter and #ClivedenLitFest on Twitter and Instagram for further updates.
About Cliveden House
A member of Relais & Châteaux, Cliveden House is a five-star luxury hotel. Owned by the National Trust, the building is operated by Iconic Luxury Hotels under a long lease arrangement. Less than 45 minutes from London and only 20 minutes from Heathrow, the hotel has 47 spacious rooms and suites in the main house in addition to Spring Cottage, a summerhouse on the banks of the Thames. There is also a fully stocked boathouse, a luxurious spa and a range of other sporting and leisure facilities.
The Cliveden Dining Room is complemented by the more informal Astor Grill, as well as other private dining, banqueting and meeting options. Cliveden’s unique setting, architecture and interiors are matched only by the palpable sense of history that infuses its walls: for over 350 years the house has been dedicated to the pursuit of pleasure, power and politics. Built in 1666 by the 2nd Duke of Buckingham as a gift to his mistress, Cliveden from its first incarnation was a site of intrigue and glamour. And so it remains.
About the Cliveden Literary Festival Committee
Lord (Andrew) Roberts, President
Andrew Roberts read Modern History at Caius College, Cambridge, from where he is a PhD. He has written over a twenty books including Salisbury: Victorian Titan (which won the Wolfson Prize), Masters and Commanders (which won the International Churchill Society Book Award), The Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War (which won the British Army Military Book of the Year Award), Napoleon the Great (which won the Grand Prix of the Fondation Napoléon and The Los Angeles Times Biography Prize) and Churchill: Walking with Destiny, which won the Council on Foreign Relations Arthur Ross Prize. His biography of King George III has won three literary prizes.
Lord Roberts is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and the Royal Historical Society, the Roger & Martha Mertz Visiting Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford, the Lehrman Institute Distinguished Lecturer at the New-York Historical Society, and a visiting professor at the Department of War Studies at King’s College, London. His website is www.andrew-roberts.net
Natalie Livingstone, Chairman
Natalie Livingstone was born and raised in London. She graduated with a first class degree in history from Christ’s College, Cambridge in 1998. She began her career as a feature writer at the Daily Express and now contributes to Tatler, Harper’s Bazaar, US Vogue, Elle, The Times and The Mail on Sunday.
Her first book, the Sunday Times bestseller, The Mistresses of Cliveden, tells the story of five extraordinary women and this remarkable house and has been optioned by Carnival Films, the television drama company behind Downton Abbey. Her latest book The Women of Rothschild was published in November 2021. She is currently writing her third book about the women involved in the Nuremberg Trials.
Catherine Ostler, Vice-Chairman
Catherine Ostler is the author of The Duchess Countess, a historical biography published in the UK in 2021 by Simon & Schuster and in the USA this year Atria Books. It was selected as a Book of the Year in the Times & Sunday Times, the Telegraph, the Spectator, Vogue and History Today magazine.
She has been editor-in-chief of Tatler, editor of ES Magazine at the Evening Standard, and of Times Weekend; and written for publications including Vogue (British and US), the Telegraph, Newsweek and the Daily Mail. Catherine read English at Oxford University. She is currently working on her second book for S&S.
Simon Sebag Montefiore, Vice-Chairman
Simon Sebag Montefiore is a bestselling historian and novelist whose books are published in 48 languages and has won prizes for his fiction and history.
His history books are Catherine the Great & Potemkin; Stalin: the Court of the Red Tsar (winner of the History Book of the Year Prize), Young Stalin (winner of the LA Times Biography, Costa Biography in UK, the Kreisky Prize in Austria and Le Grand Prix de Biographie in France ), Jerusalem: the Biography, (won Wenjin Prize in China and Jewish Book Council’s Book of Year Prize in USA), The Romanovs (winner of Lupicaia del Terriccio Literature Prize in Italy) and most recently The World: a Family History of Humanity. He is also the author of the Moscow Trilogy novels, Sashenka, One Night in Winter (won Political Novel of the Year Prize; longlisted for the Orwell Prize) and Red Sky at Noon.
