Literature Festival at Sea

Olivier Award-winning and Screen Actors Guild-nominated actress, Celia is known for her film roles in The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel movies, Calendar Girls, Nanny McPhee, Bridget Jones, Finding Your Feet, Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again and Good Grief.  On TV she is known for her roles in Pamela Adlon’s Better Things, Netflix’s The Diplomat, Absolutely Fabulous, Doctor Who, and of course as a contestant on Celebrity Traitors. 

David McCloskey is a former CIA analyst and former consultant at McKinsey & Company. While at the CIA, he worked in field stations across the Middle East and briefed senior White House officials and Arab royalty. He lives in Texas.

Charlotte Ivers is The Sunday Times’s restaurant critic. Previously a columnist for the paper, she has interviewed everyone from Idris Elba to Kemi Badenoch, and continues to write on a broad range of topics. Before joining The Sunday Times, she was an award winning radio political reporter.

Fidelis has published several non-fiction books including The Female Wits and The Bluffers Guide to Theatre. Lecturing around the world, from Stanford University to the University of Utrecht, Fidelis was Granada Professor at University of California. Her four historical murder mysteries have been translated into many languages, while her plays have been nominated for awards and gained her a Most Promising Playwright nod in Plays and Players.

Award-winning author of Breaking the Rainbow Ceiling and The Queer Bookshelf: a reader's guide, Layla speaks on all things LGBTQ+ literature. A regular on BBC Question Time, The Today Programme, and storytelling shows including The Moth.

Josh Glancy is associate editor of The Sunday Times, where he writes a weekly political column and contributes regular magazine features. Previously he was features editor of the paper and before that he was the paper’s special correspondent. Josh spent five years as a reporter in America, where he was the paper’s Washington bureau chief and before that New York correspondent, also writing a regular magazine column on life in the States.

Jason Crampton edits The Times’s cryptic crosswords. He has compiled cryptic crosswords for all the broadsheets and was part of the editorial team on the Magpie magazine. Prior to setting and editing crosswords, he spent 20 years as an academic working in computer security.

Pam Ayres has been a writer, broadcaster, and entertainer for over 40 years, and is one of the few authors who has had books in the Sunday Times bestseller charts in almost every decade since the 1970s.

An international bestselling crime and thriller author with over twenty critically-acclaimed novels to his name, Linwood Barclay's works are masterclasses in characterisation, plot, and the killer twist.

The author of numerous Sunday Times and New York Times bestselling novels, Jenny has won various awards for her writing. Her books have sold more than fifteen million copies worldwide.

Professor of Global History at Oxford University, Director of the Oxford Centre for Byzantine Research, and Senior Research Fellow at Worcester College.

A Sunday Times bestselling author and broadcaster. Her novel The Amber Fury was shortlisted for the McIlvanney Prize, and she has written and presented ten series of BBC Radio 4's Natalie Haynes Stands Up for the Classics.

Bettany is an award-winning historian, author, and broadcaster. Her books include Venus and Aphrodite, Istanbul, and The Hemlock Cup, which were all shortlisted for various awards.

Colin Grant is an award-winning author, historian and critic. His history of epilepsy, A Smell of Burning, was a Sunday Times Book of the Year. His most recent book, I'm Black So You Don't Have to Be, was a New Statesman Book of the Year. He is director of Writers Mosaic and a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Lady Perry is a British integrative psychotherapist and bestselling author. She is The Observer Magazine's advice columnist, and is currently writing her first full-length novel, due to be published in 2026.

Sir Alexander McCall Smith is one of the world’s most prolific and best-loved authors. For many years he was a professor of Medical Law and worked in universities in the UK and abroad before turning his hand to writing fiction. He has written and contributed to more than 100 books .

Sophie has worked on BBC1's national news bulletins for the past twenty years, presenting the BBC News at One, Six, and Ten. Before that she spent 5 years on BBC Breakfast with Justin Webb and then Jeremy Bowen.

Professor of Public Understanding of Law at UCL, visiting professor at Harvard Law School, and a practising barrister at 11KBW. Philippe has been involved in many significant international cases in recent years.

Andrew Lownie's books include: the prize-winning Stalin's Englishman: The Life of Guy Burgess; the top ten Sunday Times bestsellers The Mountbattens: Their Lives and Loves; Traitor King: The Scandalous Exile of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor; and Entitled: The Rise and Fall of the House of York.