Antony Beevor talks to Nick Higham

Multi-award-winning writer Sir Antony Beevor turns his gaze to the Russian mystic Rasputin. Was he a visionary, a fraud or a victim of history?

Beevor says Rasputin was a devoted monarch not a revolutionary. Yet his seduction of the Romanovs contributed more than any other individual to their collapse. Beevor paints the story of tsarist Russia heading for collapse through a renewed search for the truth about the barely literate peasant from Siberia.

Beevor is author of 13 works of non-fiction including Crete, winner of a Runciman Prize,  Stalingrad, winner of the Samuel Johnson Prize, the Wolfson Prize for History and the Hawthornden Prize for Literature, and D-Day, winner of the Prix Henry Malherbe in France and the Westminster Medal. He served in the Army for five years before leaving to take up writing. Here he talks to journalist Nick Higham, who was the BBC’s first ever media correspondent and is a former presenter of Meet the Author on the BBC news channel.

Following the event, Beevor will receive the honorary fellowship of the festival for exceptional contribution to historical studies. Previous recipients include:
2009 Baroness PD James
2010 Dame Antonia Byatt
2011 Sir Kazuo Ishiguro
2012 William Boyd
2013 Sir Philip Pullman
2014 Jan Morris
2015 David Lodge
2016 Sir Alan Aykbourn
2017 Dame Penelope Lively
2018 Anthony Horowitz
2019 Joanne Harris
2021 Alexander McCall Smith
2023 Tom Holland
2025 Abdulrazak Gurnah