Nigel Cliff

Cliff's fourth book, Moscow Nights: The Van Cliburn Story - How One Man and His Piano Transformed the Cold War, was published by Harper in September 2016 and subsequently in multiple translations. The Boston Globe named it a Book of the Year. In January 2017 it was named a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. The book won Nautilus Gold And Silver Awards.

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.

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

Cliff married the ballerina Viviana Durante in June 2009. They have a son, and live in London.

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.

Nigel Cliff (born 26 December 1969) is a British historian, biographer, translator and columnist. 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 and the Royal Literary Fund.