Saturday night at the 2012 Chiswick Book Festival will come to a close with two headline speakers from the worlds of history and sport. Historian Antony Beevor, and writer and presenter Clare Balding, will be talking about their latest works and the challenges they have faced.
Antony Beevor served as a regular officer in the 11th Hussars in Germany. He is the author of Crete – The Battle and the Resistance, which won a Runciman Prize; Paris After the Liberation, 1944-1949 (written with his wife Artemis Cooper); Stalingrad, which won the Samuel Johnson Prize, the Wolfson Prize for History and the Hawthornden Prize for Literature; Berlin – The Downfall, which received the first Longman-History Today Trustees’ Award; The Battle for Spain; The Mystery of Olga Chekhova and, most recently D-Day, which received the RUSI Westminster Medal. His books have appeared in thirty languages and sold more than five million copies. A former chairman of the Society of Authors, he has received honorary doctorates from the Universities of Kent and Bath and is visiting professor of Birkbeck College and the University of Kent.
Clare Balding is an award-winning broadcaster and writer. She became the face of the BBC’s racing coverage in 1998, and now works across a wide range of sports for television and radio. She has been a lead presenter for the Olympics, Paralympics, Winter Olympics and Commonwealth Games. For more than twelve years, she has hiked across the countryside for the BBC Radio 4 series Ramblings. Clare has presented Countryfile, Britain’s Hidden Heritage, Britain By Bike, Crufts, and Famous & Fearless, and has appeared on QI, Have I Got News for You and Sport Relief. She has been voted RTS Sports Presenter of the Year and Racing Broadcaster of the Year. She lives in West London with her partner Alice, their wayward Tibetan Terrier Archie and a cat who couldn’t give a damn called Itty. My Animals and Other Family is Clare’s first book.