As part of TW Lit Fest 2025!

Please note the venue for this performance is in the Trinity Theatre.

Interviewed by Denis Keefe.

In this talk, Charlie English will relay the true story of spycraft, smuggling and secret printing operations as researched for his excellent book The CIA Book Club, highlighting the work of a handful of extraordinary people who risked their lives to stand up to the intellectual strait-jacket Stalin created. George Minden, the head of a covert intelligence operation known as the 'CIA books programme', aimed to win the Cold War with literature.

From its Manhattan headquarters, Minden's global CIA 'book club' would infiltrate millions of banned titles into the Eastern Bloc. Volumes were smuggled on trucks and aboard yachts, dropped from balloons, and hidden in the luggage of hundreds of thousands of individual travellers. By the late 1980s, illicit literature in Poland was so pervasive that the system of communist censorship broke down, and the Iron Curtain soon followed.

Charlie English is the former head of international news at the Guardian. A fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, he is the author of several widely acclaimed histories including The Snow Tourist, The Book Smugglers of Timbuktu and The Gallery of Miracles and Madness.

Tunbridge Wells Literary Festival 2025 is proudly sponsored by:

Part of Tunbridge Wells Literary Festival 2025. TW Literary Festival 2025 will be running from May 5th to 11th. More authors to be announced very soon!