Nigel Cliff

Nigel was born in Manchester on December 26, 1969, the son of an English art student and an Irish musician. Fostered and subsequently adopted by Anne and Stuart, an accountant and shop owner, he grew up in Cheshire before attending Winchester College on a scholarship. After recovering from a lengthy illness, he went up to Oxford in 1994 to read English as a mature student at Harris Manchester College, taking the top First in Honours Moderations and a First in Finals while directing several plays and captaining a victorious wine-tasting team. He was later appointed to a Supernumerary Fellowship of Harris Manchester, and in 2022 Oxford recognised his body of work with the degree of Doctor of Letters.

He began his writing career as a theatre and film critic for The Times, an invaluable education in writing to length and deadline, usually at night. For a short spell he was a roving correspondent for The Economist, covering everything from the Quakers to public toilets. He wrote a monthly column for Dajia, the leading Chinese online magazine, and reviews for The New York Times Book Review. After studying screenwriting at UCLA, he moved to New York City to research his first book, and his publishing career has since been based in the United States.

That first book, The Shakespeare Riots (Random House, 2007), recreated the true story of a feud between the leading English and American actors of the mid-nineteenth century, which blew up into a riot in New York City and left as many as thirty dead. Narrating the independence struggle of the American entertainment business amid surging nativism, populism, and anti-immigrant violence, it also revealed Shakespeare’s extraordinary influence on the young republic’s character. It was a finalist for the National Award for Arts Writing and a Washington Post Book of the Year.

The Last Crusade was published by Harper in the US (2011) and Atlantic in the UK (2012). Another work of narrative nonfiction, it identified 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. The book drew on travels across three continents and around the Indian Ocean. 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 translation and critical edition of Marco Polo’s Travels in 2015. For this first new translation in more than fifty years, he went back to the early Old French, Italian, and Latin texts. The introduction explores how Polo shaped Western ideas of the East for generations.

Moscow Nights (Harper, 2016) told the story of American pianist Van Cliburn and his impact on the Cold War after winning the 1958 Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow against all odds. Drawing on extensive primary research and interviews in Russia and the US, the book traced the impact of the arts in bridging a seemingly insuperable divide and the personal repercussions of instant fame. Moscow Nights was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, a Boston Globe Book of the Year, and a New York Post Must-Read Book.

Nigel’s forthcoming book, The Lost Continent (Harper US and HarperNorth UK, 2027), is the story of an idea that began in ancient Greece and took sail in the Renaissance and Enlightenment: the search for a vast southern continent that was populated, civilized, and immeasurably rich. The book traces the genealogy of this belief as it gripped individuals and nations and launched some of the most spectacular voyages in the Age of Discovery. Crossing adventure narrative with intellectual history, it continues his fascination with outsiders who are thrust against the boundaries of the known.

Nigel’s books have been published in a dozen languages. He has spoken about them widely, including at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin and the British Library, and has contributed to filmed documentaries. He broadcasts regularly about his work, including on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, BBC Radio 4’s Start the Week, BBC World Service’s Newshour, and NPR’s Morning Edition. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and the Royal Geographical Society and a member of BAFTA, PEN America, the Society of Authors, and the film and theatre sections of the UK Critics’ Circle.

Alongside his books, Nigel has worked extensively in film and television. He has written an adapted screenplay of The Shakespeare Riots for Muse Productions and has co-created original television drama series for Coat Company and Sister Pictures and written original feature screenplays on subjects from Napoleon to the Victorian royals and the Second World War. With his wife, the ballerina Viviana Durante, he co-founded and runs Viviana Durante Company, which presents dance theatre works in the UK and internationally. They and their son, Orlando, make their home in London.