Éric Vuillard & Mark Polizzotti with Amelia Gentleman Live, Free and Online Tonight at 7.30pm

Comunicato Stampa disponibile solo in lingua originale. 

After five excellent discussions we've reached our final International Booker Prize Shortlist event, as the sixth pair join us this evening – read on for more details and join us live at 7.30pm on the Book Festival's website.

Tonight, writer and film-maker Éric Vuillard and translator Mark Polizzotti discuss their gripping historical novel The War of the Poor with Amelia Gentleman. This #event includes a short performed reading from the novel by actor Ken Nwosu, directed by Blanche McIntyre on behalf of the Royal Shakespeare Company and commissioned by The Booker Prizes.

Vuillard was catapulted to fame in his native France when he won the Prix Goncourt in 2017 for his novel The Order of the Day, set in Austria in the lead-up to the Second World War. This also began the working relationship between Vuillard and Polizzotti.

In his newest work, Vuillard goes further into history with a deeply-engaging account of the life of a radical preacher in 16th-century Germany. Thomas Müntzer's astonishing life is much less distant from a 21st-century English-speaker's perspective than it may at first sound – not least because Vuillard's short novel is as entertaining as a thriller and rendered brilliantly into English by Polizzotti.

Although the protagonist's life unfolds against the backdrop of the Reformation, the Great Schism, the Peasants' War in Germany and the Peasants' Revolt in England, there are remarkable synergies with the unapologetically populist governments, brutal inequality and rising tide of public protest that are so evident across the world right now.

In this evening's #event, Vuillard and Polizzotti discuss the novel with journalist #ameliagentleman, whose book The Windrush Betrayal revealed how the British government's 'hostile environment' policy led to thousands being incorrectly branded as illegal immigrants.

All the events in this series are FREE to watch and broadcast live from our website with live captioning available. Each session is also available to view on-demand after the initial live broadcase. You can purchase any of the books in the series, including The War of the Poor, from the Book Festival's independent online bookshop here.

Our thanks and very best wishes go to all 12 of the shortlisted authors and translators for the 2021 International Booker Prize as we reach the end of an incredible, inspiring series of events. The winner will be announced next Wednesday,  2 June, in an online ceremony broadcast from Coventry – the UK City of Culture 2021. If you missed the winner's #event – or those of any of the nominees – you can catch-up on-demand on our website. 

Our thanks go to each and every one of our sponsors and supporters for their continued support as we adjust and plan for the future. You can view who they all are on our supporters board.

If you feel you'd like to make a donation to the Book #festival charity to support our work, you can do so at any time on our website.