Saturday 21st – Sunday 22nd September 2024
www.clivedenliteraryfestival.org • @ClivedenLitFest • Images • Highlights Video
Taplow, Berkshire. Friday 26 July 2024. Cliveden Literary Festival (21-22 September) is delighted to reveal this year’s initial programme as tickets go on sale from 10am on Monday 29 July.
Across the weekend, the Festival will host a constellation of world-leading thinkers, including
Salman Rushdie, Rachel Weisz, William Boyd, Ian McEwan, Tom Holland, Emily Maitlis, John Banville, Neil Jordan, Robert Harris, Patrick Radden Keefe, Niall Ferguson, Elif Shafak, Helen Castor, Dan Jones, William Dalrymple, Alex Younger, Michael Gove, Merve Emre, Nicole Taylor, David McCloskey, Olivette Otele, Robert Hardman, Joanne Cash, Peter Stothard, Camilla Cavendish, Ronen Bergman, Daisy Dunn, Jasmine El-Gamal, Anne Somerset, Alice Winn, Yana Peel, James Marriott, Louis Sarkozy, Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones, Albert Read, Rachel Eliza Griffiths, Luke Pepera, Alice Thomson, Madhumita Murgia, Plum Sykes, Nicky Haslam, Alexandra Mousavizadeh, Kate Weinberg, Harry Beaufort, Rosalind Brown, Larry Kramer, Nadhim Zahawi, Hannah MacInnes, Henrietta Spencer-Churchill and our founders Natalie Livingstone, Catherine Ostler, Andrew Roberts and Simon Sebag Montefiore.
Taking place at the historic Cliveden House in Berkshire, this year’s festival features the leading writers and thinkers of today across culture, politics and history. In what could well be the literary event of the year, Salman Rushdie will be speaking to Ian McEwan about his storied and courageous literary career; ex-MI6 chief Alex Younger and Niall Ferguson investigate global threats to the West; Emily Maitlis and Michael Gove examine the future of British government; eminent historians William Dalrymple and Simon Sebag Montefiore discuss the Mughal and Romanov dynasties; Tom Holland and Simon Sebag Montefiore discuss Jerusalem and the nature of holiness in history and today’s supposedly secular world; and Merve Emre and Elif Shafak interrogate the future of fiction.
Cliveden Literary Festival is renowned as a forum for lively discussion, thought-provoking ideas, and political debate, in the most beautiful of settings, with something for everyone. Last year, Katherine Rundell said ‘the speakers are spectacular, they are such a range of brilliant and original thinkers’, while Marlon James described the festival as having ‘the foremost names … a lot of those really big and really important conversations happen here’.
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 are given early access to festival tickets today, Friday 26 July, with the wider public able to book from 10am on Monday 29 July, on the Cliveden Literary Festival website.
ENDS
For all press enquiries, to request images, interviews or register for a press pass, please contact: Jane Lau & Georgina Moore at Midas: Jane.Lau@midaspr.co.uk • Georgina.Moore@midaspr.co.uk
Cliveden Literary Festival will run from 21st – 22nd September 2024
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 2023 programme featured: 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, Nick Laird, David Lammy, Justine Picardie and Tom Crewe.
Previous speakers at Cliveden Literary Festival include Amor Towles, Emerald Fennell, Peter Frankopan, Chibundu Onuzo, Lionel Shriver, Dan Jones, Kate Mosse, Ian McEwan, Robert Harris, Kwasi Kwarteng, Richard Dearlove, Cherie Blair, Armando Iannucci, Niall Ferguson, Alain de Botton, Simon Schama, Elif Shafak, Sebastian Faulks, Antonia Fraser, David Baddiel, Lior Raz, Kate Bingham, David Petraeus, Michael Gove, Camilla Long, Stephen Frears, Priti Patel, Hallie Rubenhold, Leila Slimani, Emily Maitlis, Bret Easton Ellis, Ben Okri, 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 the internationally bestselling author whose prize-winning books have been published in forty-eight languages. Catherine the Great and Potemkin was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize; Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar won the British Book Awards History Book of the Year Prize; Young Stalin won the Costa Biography Award (UK), the LA Times Book Prize for Biography (USA), the Grand Prix de la Biographie Politique (France) and the Kreisky Prize (Austria); Jerusalem: The Biography won the JBC Book of the Year Prize (USA) and the Wenjin Book Prize (China); The Romanovs: 1613-1918 won the Lupicaia del Terriccio Book Prize (Italy); and The World was the Times History Book of the Year. He is the author of the Moscow Trilogy of novels: Sashenka, Red Sky at Noon and One Night in Winter, which won the Political Fiction Book of the Year Award.
