Jay McInerney, Julian Barnes, Candace Bushnell, Michael Connelly, Patrick Radden Keefe, Patrick Marber & David Nicholls: early speaker highlights for Cliveden Literary Festival 2026
News
Discover the first speaker highlights for Cliveden Literary Festival 2026, featuring bestselling authors, acclaimed historians, and leading political commentators.
Cliveden Literary Festival (10-11 October) is delighted to reveal this year’s list of speakers as tickets go on sale from 10am on Friday 7 August.
Taking place at the historic Cliveden House in Berkshire, this year’s festival features the leading writers of today across culture, politics and history. Highlights will include: Kemi Badenoch will talk to Simon Sebag Montefiore about her reinvention of the Conservative Party and the tumultuous state of British politics; Robert Harris will discuss Agrippa, his new novel exploring loyalty and ruthlessness at the birth of the Roman Empire, with Tom Holland; novelist Alice Winn will dissect the magic of historical fiction; and Patrick Radden Keefe, in conversation with Misha Glenny, will discuss his bestselling investigation into London’s underworld.
Meanwhile, panels of experts will gather to debate the most pressing questions of the moment, from the making of the modern Middle East to the state of America in its 250th year. Politicians and commentators including Wes Streeting, Joanne Cash, James McAuley, Ayesha Hazarika, David McCloskey, Alex Burghart, Maurice Glasman and Matt Goodwin will be put to the test on the arguments dividing Westminster. In between will be debates on the art of narrative; the world of Renoir; Nazi Germany and the rise and fall of Napoleon's empire; from why we are having fewer children, and fewer relationships, to our enduring love of gardens - the last of these in the most fitting of settings, the house and gardens of Cliveden itself.
Across the weekend, the Festival will host a stellar cast of writers, philosophers, polemicists and politicians, including Katie Kitamura, Deborah Lipstadt, Emily Maitlis, Michael Moritz, Mishal Husain, Jonathan Bate, Eugene Rogan, Michael Gove, Ed Chisholm, Lauren Collins, James Cahill, Camilla Cavendish, John Burn-Murdoch, Victor Sebestyen, Imogen Edwards-Jones, Louis Sarkozy, Hermione Eyre, John McWhorter, Alexandra Suich Bass, Alice Lassman, Albert Read, Georgia Beaufort, Yana Peel, Tom Stuart-Smith and Sue Stuart-Smith; and our founders, Natalie Livingstone, Catherine Ostler, 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. When Her Majesty The Queen attended Cliveden Literary Festival last year, she described it as ‘A perfection of a literary festival’.
Now in its ninth year, the festival draws on Cliveden House’s unique history as a literary salon frequented by writers and thinkers including Alexander Pope, 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 Friday 7 August, on the Cliveden Literary Festival website.