The Gibunco Gibraltar Literary Festival has added a further four events to its programme.

Sir Liam Fox

Sir Liam Fox qualified as a medical doctor from the University of Glasgow. He served as the Member of Parliament for North Somerset from 1992 to 2024. He served as the Secretary of State for Defence between 2010 and 2011, and as the first Secretary of State for International Trade and the President of the Board of Trade between 2016 and 2019. In 2013 he published Rising Tides, a book analysing the challenges of the era of globalisation. He was the UK’s nominee to be the Director-General of the World Trade Organisation in 2020. In 2021 he was invited by the Ambassadors of UAE, Israel, Bahrain and Morocco to set up and chair the UK Abraham Accords group to promote and support the international peace agreement. In 2024 he published his second book The Coming Storm: how water will write the 21st century, examining its crucial role in security, climate and human health from his different professional experiences.

Keir Giles

Keir Giles has spent his career watching, studying and explaining Russia.

Keir is a regular contributor and commentator on Russian affairs for international print and broadcast media, as well as publishing in-depth research in academic and military publications across Europe and in North America. Keir is a Senior Consulting Fellow at the UK's Royal Institute of International Affairs (Chatham House), but has also worked with more than a dozen governments and defence forces around the world predicting and analysing the Russian threat.

After one of the briefest careers on record with the Royal Air Force and travelling widely in the Soviet Union while gaining his first degree in Russian, Keir Giles co-founded the first company providing Western pilots the opportunity to fly Soviet military aircraft, at sites near Moscow and in Crimea. Later working with the BBC Monitoring Service (BBCM) in the UK and Russia, he continued to specialise in the Russian military, and transferred to the UK Defence Academy to work on Russian strategy and doctrine, information and cyber warfare, and tracking the development of Russia's plans for war.

Keir has authored multiple publications explaining the Russian approach to warfare, including NATO's Handbook of Russian Information Warfare (2016), and Moscow Rules: What Drives Russia to Confront the West (Brookings, 2019), diving deep into the persistent factors causing relations with Russia to fall into crisis. His book Russia's War on Everybody (Bloomsbury, 2022) described the human impact of Russia's campaigns to acquire power and influence around the world, far beyond Ukraine.

Paterson Joseph

Paterson Joseph has performed extensively on the British stage in venues large and small, from the Bush Theatre, to the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford and the National Theatre in London via The Royal Exchange in Manchester. He has been working on TV since the late 80s on UK and US shows.

The Secret Diaries of Charles Ignatius Sancho is his debut novel. During his presentation, Patterson will chat about the reason for writing this book, and his life growing up in Britain as a Black child. He will contrast and compare that life with Sancho's 250 years before he was born. The event will feature some readings from the novel and an audience question and answer session.

Clive, Geraldine and Stuart Finlayson

The Finlaysons have all published in major international journals and have authored a range of books locally and internationally. At the 2024 Literary Festival they will talk about two books. One is a recent book on the Neanderthal Extinction, which has been published by the prestigious Spanish publisher Salvat. The other is a brand-new book entitled Gibraltar: geography, nature, history, heritage which will be launched at the Literary festival. In it, the Finlaysons describe decades of research and give an overview of Gibraltar’s rich history and how geography and nature have shaped it. They also describe the heritage which survives from this incredibly rich and varied past. The work is illustrated by their own photographs as well as archival images of Gibraltar in the past. It promises to be a unique and personal overview of Gibraltar, written by those who have researched it firsthand. It will be a landmark book that will be an essential read for all those interested in Gibraltar and its past.

Professor Clive Finlayson has a doctorate from Oxford University. He is Beacon Professor at the University of Gibraltar and Visiting Professor at Liverpool John Moores University; he was formerly Adjunct Professor in Toronto University. He is an elected member of the European Academy. Clive’s interests also range far and wide, but he declares that the study of birds has always been top of his list. He is well known internationally for his work on Neanderthals.

Professor Geraldine Finlayson has a doctorate from Anglia Ruskin University and is an Adjunct Professor at Liverpool John Moores University in the United Kingdom. Her principal research line has been in the reconstruction of the past landscapes of Gibraltar. Her interests are varied and include understanding of how cuisine has developed historically in Gibraltar; nuances of the way we speak in Gibraltar; and underwater archaeology, for which she is an underwater archaeology instructor.

Dr Stewart Finlayson, Geraldine and Clive’s son, also has a doctorate from Anglia Ruskin University and is an Honorary Research Fellow at Liverpool John Moores University. His passion for birds, something of a family tradition, took him to study the way in which Neanderthals exploited birds, revealing in detail how they exploited a wide range of species, not just for food but also for their feathers and talons. The implications of this work had a far outreach, as it had huge implications for our understanding of Neanderthal cognitive capacities. Stewart follows the family line of a diversity of interests. He is a bat specialist, dedicating much of his research time to understanding the ecology and movements of Gibraltar’s bats; the research takes him to caves and other bat roosts across much of southern Iberia.

The Minister for Tourism and Culture, the Hon Christian Santos, said: ‘This impressive array of international and local authors shows both the depth and diversity of the Festival programme. From international relations to historical novels and local heritage, there’s something for all interests and tastes.’