Early speaker highlights for Cliveden Literary Festival 2025
Taking place at the historic Cliveden House in Berkshire, this year’s festival features the leading writers of today across culture, politics and history. Some of the highlights for 2025 have just been unveiled and will include: Michael Gove and Sarah Vine will tell Andrew Roberts about their marriage and divorce in the political spotlight; Salman Rushdie and Rachel Eliza Griffiths will discuss their creative partnership; beloved actor Richard E. Grant will talk to Georgia Beaufort about the highs and lows of Hollywood and his personal life; renowned philosopher Alain de Botton will discuss his theories of love, heartbreak and sorrow; and Wild Swans author Jung Chang and The Silk Roads’ Peter Frankopan will consider the past, present and future of China with Geordie Greig.
Meanwhile, panels of experts will gather to discuss 2025’s most compelling issues. In the political sphere, guests will learn about intrigue inside the White House, the divided American nation, and 21st-century espionage. In the literary realm, visitors will hear about the enduring allure of Jane Austen, or the writing of crime stories both real and fictional. And the most pressing questions in British politics will be cross-examined in Cliveden’s very own Question Time, with Alex Burghart and Emily Maitlis.
Across the weekend, the Festival will host a stellar cast of writers, philosophers, polemicists and politicians, including Elif Shafak, Marlon James, Anthony Horowitz, William Boyd, Joanna Coles, Peter Godwin, Helen Castor, Patrick Marber, Tristram Hunt, Merve Emre, Jake Sullivan, Bari Weiss, Andrew Davies, Tina Brown, James Marriott, Charles Moore, Jonathan Bate, David McCloskey, Dambisa Moyo, Jonathan Freedland, Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, Nicholas Boggs, Mark Rosenblatt, Gordon Corera, Lucy Hughes-Hallett, Freya Johnston, Robert Hardman, Sarah Churchwell, Yana Peel, Andrei Soldatov, Adam LeBor, James McAuley, Tim Bouverie, Anne Somerset, Cindy Yu, Jake Wallis Simons, Alice Loxton, Luke Pepera and Caroline Derby; and our founders, Catherine Ostler, Natalie Livingstone, Simon Sebag Montefiore and Andrew Roberts.
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, Elif Shafak described the festival as a cultural space we leave ‘feeling much more nurtured, nourished and inspired’; Rachel Eliza Griffiths said ‘the setting of Cliveden… is a kind of mirror of the beauty that I find in books’.
Now in its eighth 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, with the wider public able to book from 10am on Monday 11 August, on the Cliveden Literary Festival website.
Previously…
The Season: Cliveden Literary Festival 2025 dates announced – The Sloaney
