Queen Camilla is launching a new literary podcast, an audio spin-off from her existing The Queen’s Reading Room charity, Instagram presence and literary festival at Hampton Court Palace. This is a pet project for Her Majesty that stemmed from an initial small-scale book club to become a collection of literary endeavours.
However, the Queen is not actually the host of her new podcast. Which, perhaps, is understandable, given the recent royal track record with podcasts (let’s gloss over the mixed response to the Duchess of Sussex’s Archetypes project with Spotify).
Taking a different approach, this podcast is produced independently by the Queen’s charity with the aim of “promoting the joy of reading”. Our host is the thoroughly capable Vicki Perrin, the CEO of the Queen’s Reading Room. Perrin has an established career in broadcasting, journalism and PR and in literary events, most notably formerly running BBC Radio 2’s 500 Words children’s writing competition. Here, she is delightfully welcoming, with notably well-spoken vowels that would, you get the impression, be at home in any royal reading room.
Each episode features an interview with a guest author “in their own reading room” (does everyone have a reading room now? Is this the new kitchen island?), starting off with the crime writer Ian Rankin. After some reflections from Rankin on his love of reading in response to some questions that we don’t get to hear, there’s a brief bit of archive of the then-Duchess of Cornwall speaking to another crime writer, Peter James, in 2021, about how he drew from real-life cases to write a novel about fraudsters.
