Laura Cumming: Thunderclap - a memoir of art and life & sudden death

Shortlisted for the inaugural Women's Prize for Non-Fiction in 2024, Thunderclap is the extraordinary new book from chief art critic of the Observer Laura Cumming. Her celebrated book is a beautifully illustrated memoir of a life in art and a passionate evocation of a shared love of painting, interweaving the lives of the great Dutch Golden Age painter Carel Fabritius with Laura's own life and the life of her Scottish painter father. 

Laura Cumming has been chief art critic of the Observer since 1999. Her books include A Face to the World: On Self-Portraits (2009) and The Vanishing Man: In Pursuit of Velázquez (2016) which won the James Tait Black Biography Prize. Her family memoir On Chapel Sands: my Mother and other Missing Persons (2019) was a Sunday Times bestseller and shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford, Costa and Rathbone’s Folio prizes.

She will be interviewed by festival Director Thomas du Plessis