Camilla celebrates life-enhancing books at Chatsworth festival
Queen Camilla opened the first day of her Queen's Reading Room festival at Chatsworth House in Derbyshire on 19 September with a simple message about why she started it. She loves books for their life-enhancing power and wants to share that love with others, The Guardian reported.
The Queen's Reading Room is a charity, the organisation Camilla founded after the Instagram book club she ran during the pandemic. It was formally launched as a charity in 2023 to celebrate books and bring readers and writers closer together.
Six years on from those first online lists, Camilla said the project has become a global community of millions of readers in more than 180 countries. Members swap recommendations, take part in research and donate thousands of books to women's refuges and homeless shelters.
At Chatsworth, Camilla attended a reception in the Sculpture Gallery alongside writers including Lee Child and Elif Shafak. The festival returned to Chatsworth for a second year on 19 and 20 September 2026, according to the estate.
She also named four autumn recommendations for followers. The list mixes classic and contemporary. It is Finding Belle by Reeta Chakrabarti, The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde, Whistler by Ann Patchett and Sashenka by Simon Sebag Montefiore.
The visit also looked ahead to a BBC Arts film for the National Year of Reading 2026, a UK-wide campaign to promote reading. Camilla will appear in The Book That Changed My Life, which is expected to air on BBC Two on 14 October. She first announced the programme at a Clarence House reception in March to mark five years of the book club.
The documentary follows Camilla meeting four people whose lives were changed by a book when they most needed it. At the festival she spoke to one contributor, Ian Kirby from Gateshead, about finding community and hope through reading. Kirby fell into depression after a traumatic incident at home and later found new perspective after joining a local book club and reading boxer Glenn McCrory's autobiography.
The festival took place as Buckingham Palace answered claims about King Charles III in a new memoir by Charles Spencer, Earl Spencer, about his sister Diana, Princess of Wales. The book, titled Swan Song: Diana, My Sister, alleges that Charles, then Prince of Wales, said "we'll forget her soon" after Diana's death in 1997, BBC reported. Buckingham Palace responded with the statement: "The pain of fraternal grief can cloud reason."
