Lucy Hughes-Hallett: Cleopatra: Life and Legend @ Southwold Literary Festival

Lucy Hughes-Hallett is a biographer, cultural historian & novelist whose books have won the Samuel Johnson Prize, the Duff Cooper Prize, the Costa Biography of the Year Award, the Plutarch Prize & the Biographers Club Award for an Exceptional Contribution to Biography.

Her book on Gabriele d'Annunzio, "The Pike", was named in the Sunday Times as 'the biography of the decade'.

Her most recent book is "The Scapegoat: the Brilliant Brief Life of the Duke of Buckingham".

She is a widely respected critic and in 2020 she was chair of the judges of the International Booker Prize. "Cleopatra: Histories, Dreams and Distortions", her first book, has recently been re-issued in a revised edition.Geoffrey Chaucer made Cleopatra leading heroine of his "Legend of Good Women".

Half a millennium later Cecil B de Mille called her 'the wickedest woman in history'.

Poets, painters, playwrights and filmmakers have been interpreting and distorting the story of the last queen of Egypt ever since her suicide in 44 AD.

Lucy Hughes-Hallett talks about the real Cleopatra, and about the many legends that have grown up around her.

Drawing on sources from Plutarch' Lives to Carry on Cleo, and showing a wealth of gorgeous pictures, she explains how hostile Roman propaganda created the image of a woman so alluring that for her love's sake the world would be well lost.Unreserved seating.