Cliveden Literary Festival & other news from Colman Getty

Cliveden Literary Festival   Cliveden, the magnificent English country house in Berkshire with a unique and extraordinary history of politics and intrigue, aristocracy and espionage, sex and scandal, also boasts an impressive literary heritage as the country’s foremost literary salon. This month we launched the brand new Cliveden Literary Festival  which will bring that tradition back to life. The boutique festival, which uniquely focuses on politics and history, will take place over one weekend - Saturday 14 and Sunday 15 October - in the exquisite surroundings of the Italianate, Grade I listed Cliveden House and its beautiful gardens. It will welcome a host of influential writers – from Sebastian Faulks, Robert Harris, Ian McEwan and Howard Jacobson to Frances Osborne, Antony Beevor, Simon Schama and Michael Gove- revisiting Cliveden’s illustrious literary past and continuing the tradition of the house as a haven for lovers of literature. The launch attracted some significant print and online media comment including Evening Standard and Mail Online. Follow @ClivedenLitFest for programme announcements, ticket sales and fun facts about the great writers and potentates associated with Cliveden.

 

Bridget Jones's Baby   This weekend at Hay Festival, Helen Fielding was presented with her prize for winning the 2017 Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for comic fiction: a locally-sourced Gloucestershire Old Spot Pig, named after the winning title, Bridget Jones’s Baby. Her winnings also include a jeroboam of Bollinger Special Cuvée, a case of Bollinger La Grande Année and the completed set of the Everyman Wodehouse collection, which now totals 99 books.

 

The International Dylan Thomas Prize   On a beautiful spring day we travelled to the sparkling new Bay Campus at Swansea University for the announcement of the winner of this year’s International Dylan Thomas Prize in partnership with Swansea University. The prize supports young writers, awarding £30,000 to a writer aged 39 or younger and considers the best work of literature across the genres of poetry, plays, short stories and novels. This year’s winner, Fiona McFarlane, just fitted the criteria, having recently turned 39. Her book, The High Places, is an unsettling collection of short stories which the judging panel described as “haunting in their oddity and moving in their human empathy.” Her win was covered internationally, including an interview with BBC Radio 4’s Today programme from a Swansea BBC studio with a portrait of Dylan Thomas on the wall.

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