Nigel Cliff

Nigel Cliff (born 26 December 1969) is a British historian, biographer, critic and translator. He specialises in narrative nonfiction, especially in the fields of cultural history and the history of exploration. He is a Fellow of Harris Manchester College, Oxford.^[1]

Biography

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.^[2] He was a film and theatre critic for The Times and a contributor to The Economist.^[3] He writes for a range of publications including The New York Times. Cliff lectures widely, including at Oxford University,^[4] the Harry Ransom Center^[5] and the British Library.^[6]

Career

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 the 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."^[7] In the Los Angeles Times, Phillip Lopate called it 'Brilliantly engrossing... exemplary... engaging, worldly, fluent... crammed with entertaining nuggets.'.^[8] The book was a Washington Post Book of the Year^[9] and was a finalist for the National Award for Arts Writing.^[10] Cliff wrote the adapted screenplay for Muse Productions.^[11]

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).^[12] It was subsequently issued as The Last Crusade: The Epic Voyages of Vasco da Gama by Harper Perennial in 2012.^[13] The book was published under the latter name by Atlantic in the UK^[14] and under the former name in Portugal, Brazil, Japan, Russia, Turkey, and Poland, with publication forthcoming in China.^[15] The book was a New York Times Notable Book^[16] and was shortlisted for the PEN Hessell-Tiltman Prize.^[17] In the New York Times Eric Ormsby wrote: "Cliff has a novelist's gift for depicting character."^[18] In The Sunday Times James McConnachie called the book 'stirringly epic...[a] thrilling narrative."^[19]

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.^[20]

Cliff's fourth book, Moscow Nights: The Van Cliburn Story - How One Man and His Piano Transformed the Cold War, is published by Harper in September 2016.^[21]

Personal life

Cliff is married to the ballerina Viviana Durante. They have a son and live in London.

Books

• 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. 

References

External links

• Nigel Cliff official website