Queen Camilla releases statement after royal prepares for starring role

Queen Camilla had a few powerful words to say as she performed an important task, one that she holds close to her heart.

On Saturday, King Charles’s wife had stepped out to the eighth Cliveden Literary Festival just hours after an update was released about her upcoming starring role.

Camilla, who is known to be a voracious reader and a literature fan, opened the 2025 iteration of the festival. Buckingham Palace revealed that the Queen had also hosted a reception for authors, festival supporters, charity partners, and students from the London Academy of Excellence Tottenham before it kicked off.

During the festival, the Queen had made a speech in which she not only honoured her late friend and author, Dame Jilly Cooper, but also other famed authors.

She also gave a nod to her “husband’s great great great grandmother Queen Victoria” as she spoke about the significance of the festival and the literary gems that came from it.

The Palace particularly highlighted the excerpt from Camilla’s speech.

“There are few houses and gardens in England that are quite as steeped in literature as this one. Rudyard Kipling stayed in the early 1900s,” it read. “JM Barrie enjoyed strolling in the woods. George Bernard Shaw briefly came to escape the Blitz. Henry James and Edith Wharton holidayed here.”

It continued, “The estate is praised in Jerome K Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat, it inspired Kenneth Grahame to write The Wind in the Willows and I understand that it is even possible to order Ian Fleming’s Vesper Martini at the bar – a drink that was a favourite of the late, much-missed Dame Jilly Cooper.”

The update comes as Camilla will be featured as the main character in Peter James’s latest book in the murder-mystery series based on detective superintendent Roy Grace.

In the new book, which is anticipated to release this month, will see its plot set in London rather than Brighton.