Nigel Cliff is a biographer, historian, translator, critic, columnist, screenwriter and producer. His books encompass the Age of Discovery, 19th-century battles over Shakespeare and the Cold War – a chronologically promiscuous body of work united by a fascination with cultural exchange and a fondness for outsiders. He is also the translator and editor of Marco Polo’s Travels for Penguin Classics. In 2022 Oxford University awarded Nigel the degree of Doctor of Letters in recognition of a body of work of international importance.

Nigel’s first book, The Shakespeare Riots (Random House, 2007), tells the stranger-than-fiction tale of a feud between Edwin Forrest, the first American star, and William Charles Macready, the leading British actor of the mid-19th century, that escalated into a riot in New York leaving as many as 30 dead. The story of the struggle for independence of the American entertainment business, it also reveals Shakespeare’s extraordinary influence on the young republic’s character. Praised as “a brilliant debut” by Michael Dobson in the London Review of Books and “brilliantly engrossing” by the LA Times, the book was a finalist for the National Award for Arts Writing/Marfield Prize and a Washington Post book of the year. Muse Productions optioned the film rights and Nigel wrote the adapted screenplay.

The Last Crusade: The Epic Voyages of Vasco da Gama was published by Harper in the U.S. (2011) and Atlantic in the UK (2012), with Portuguese, Brazilian, Japanese, Turkish, Russian, Polish, simplified Chinese and traditional Chinese editions following. It identifies Vasco da Gama’s discovery of the sea route from Europe to India as a turning point in the balance of power between Christianity and Islam and more broadly between East and West. Nigel’s research in Gama’s footsteps took him across three continents and around the Indian Ocean. Praised as “stirringly epic… a thrilling narrative” by The Sunday Times, it was a New York Times Notable Book and was shortlisted for the PEN/Hessell-Tiltman History Prize and the Mountbatten Maritime Prize.

Penguin Classics published Nigel’s new translation and critical edition of Marco Polo’s Travels in 2015; the books is available as a hardback, paperback and Folio Society edition. For this, the first new translation in more than fifty years, he went back to the early Old French, Italian, and Latin texts and disappeared down the numerous rabbit holes of medieval Asian history. Terming the translation “excellent,” the Polan scholar Stephen G. Haw wrote that the edition “will doubtless become a standard work.”

Nigel’s fourth book was Moscow Nights: The Van Cliburn Story—How One Man and His Piano Transformed the Cold War (Harper, 2016 and subsequently published in Russian, Dutch, Japanese and traditional and simplified Chinese). In pursuit of the remarkable story of the 1958 Tchaikovsky Competition and its political and personal aftermath, he undertook extensive primary research in Russia and the U.S. and interviewed many surviving witnesses. Moscow Nights was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, a Boston Globe Book of the Year, a New York Post Must-read Book and a winner of Nautilus Gold and Silver Awards.

Nigel was born in 1969 and was a scholar of Winchester College and Harris Manchester College, Oxford, where he gained a First in English and the Beddington Prize in English Literature. A former theatre and film critic for the London Times and a correspondent for The Economist, he has contributed to a wide range of publications including The New York Times Book Review, the American National Biography and Dajia, the online magazine of Tencent for which he wrote a column from 2017 to 2019.

He lectures widely, most recently at Oxford University, the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin, and the British Library, and broadcasts regularly about his work, including on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, BBC Radio 4’s Start the Week, BBC World Service’s Newshour, and PBS’s Morning Edition. He has been a Fellow of Harris Manchester College, Oxford and the Royal Literary Fund and is a member of PEN America, the Society of Authors, and the film and theatre sections of the Critics Circle. With his wife, the ballerina Viviana Durante, he co-founded and runs Viviana Durante Company. They and their son, Orlando, make their home in London.