Nigel Cliff

Born in Manchester, Cliff was educated on scholarships at Winchester College and Harris Manchester College, Oxford University, where he gained a first-class degree and was awarded the Beddington Prize for English Literature.[1] He has been a film and theatre critic for The Times, a contributor to The Economist,[2] a columnist for Dajia, the online magazine of Tencent,[3] and a reviewer for The New York Times Book Review.[4] Cliff has lectured at Oxford University,[5] the Harry Ransom Center[6] and the British Library[7] and is a regular guest on television and radio programmes including Start the Week[8] and MSNBC's Morning Joe.[9] He was a Fellow of Harris Manchester College, Oxford from 2016-2021 and a Fellow of the Royal Literary Fund from 2017-2019.[10] He also runs a ballet company[11] and has produced shows for the Barbican Centre and the Bolshoi Theatre.[12]

Cliff's first book, The Shakespeare Riots: Revenge, Drama, and Death in Nineteenth-century America, was published in the United States by Random House in 2007. Centring on a feud between leading Shakespearean actors William Charles Macready and Edwin Forrest that led to the deadly Astor Place Riot of 1849, it dramatises the birth of a distinctly American entertainment industry and demonstrates the centrality of Shakespeare to nineteenth-century American identity.

Writing in the London Review of Books, Michael Dobson called the book 'wonderful... a brilliant debut... both enthralling and scholarly."[13] In the Los Angeles Times, Phillip Lopate called it 'Brilliantly engrossing... exemplary... engaging, worldly, fluent... crammed with entertaining nuggets.'.[14] The book was a Washington Post Book of the Year[15] and was a finalist for the National Award for Arts Writing.[16] Cliff wrote the adapted screenplay for Muse Productions.[17]

Cliff's second book was Holy War: How Vasco da Gama's Epic Voyages Turned the Tide in a Centuries-old Clash of Civilisations (Harper, 2011).[18] It was subsequently issued as The Last Crusade: The Epic Voyages of Vasco da Gama by Harper Perennial in 2012.[19] The book was published under the latter name by Atlantic in the UK[20] and under the former name in Portugal, Brazil, Japan, Russia, Turkey, Poland, China and Taiwan.[21] The book was a New York Times Notable Book[22] and was shortlisted for the PEN Hessell-Tiltman Prize[23] and the Mountbatten Award.[24] In the New York Times Eric Ormsby wrote: "Cliff has a novelist's gift for depicting character."[25] In The Sunday Times James McConnachie called the book 'stirringly epic...[a] thrilling narrative."[26]

Cliff's third book was a new translation and critical edition of Marco Polo's Travels for Penguin Classics, which was released in the UK and U.S. in 2015. For this first all-new translation in a half-century, he went back to the original texts in French, Latin and Italian.[27]

Cliff's fourth book, Moscow Nights: The Van Cliburn Story - How One Man and His Piano Transformed the Cold War, was published by Harper in September 2016[28] and subsequently in multiple translations. The Boston Globe named it a Book of the Year. In January 2017 it was named a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.[29] The book won Nautilus Gold And Silver Awards.[30]

Cliff married the ballerina Viviana Durante in June 2009.[31] They have a son, and live in London.[32]

• Cliff, Nigel (2007). The Shakespeare Riots: Revenge, Drama, and Death in Nineteenth-Century America. New York: Random House. ISBN 9780345486943.
• Cliff, Nigel (2011). Holy War: How Vasco da Gama's Epic Voyages Turned the Tide in a Centuries-Old Clash of Civilizations. New York: Harper. ISBN 9780061735127.
• Cliff, Nigel (2012). The Last Crusade: The Epic Voyages of Vasco da Gama. New York: Harper Perennial. ISBN 9780061735134.
• Cliff, Nigel (2015). Marco Polo, The Travels. London: Penguin Classics. ISBN 978-0141198774.
• Cliff, Nigel (2016). Moscow Nights: The Van Cliburn Story - How One Man and His Piano Transformed the Cold War.

• Official website