An evening with Tom Fletcher

Diplomat, foreign policy expert and writer Tom Fletcher will be the speaker at a special extra Guernsey Literary Festival event in September.

He will be interviewed by Guernsey’s Lt-Governor, Lt-General Richard John Cripwell CB CBE.

Tom Fletcher, who is the Principal of Hertford College, Oxford University, was Foreign Policy Adviser to three prime ministers, Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and David Cameron. From 2011 to 2015 he was the UK’s Ambassador to Lebanon.

More recently he was a visiting professor at New York University, advised the Global Business Coalition for Education and chaired the International Advisory Council of the Creative Industries Federation. In 2018 he founded The Foundation for Opportunity to ‘support good people doing good things in public life’.

But Tom Fletcher is also an author, writing books about international diplomacy as well as fiction – his latest novel is The Assassin, published by Canelo in March, which begins with the kidnap of a High Commissioner’s daughter and involves dangerous negotiations and political assassination – the world is indeed a dangerous place.

Tom Fletcher’s non fiction books include The Naked Diplomat: Power and Politics in the Digital Age (Harper Collins, June 2016) and Ten Survival Skills for a World in Flux (Harper Collins, February 2022). His fiction books include The Ambassador (Canelo, August 2022) and The Assassin.

He presented the BBC series The Battle for Liberal Democracy (2023), and led a review of British diplomacy for the UK Foreign Office in 2016. He has also authored reports on the future of the United Nations (for the UN Secretary General), and on the skills the next generation need to thrive in the 21st century.