Queen Camilla reveals how her father's love of reading shaped his life – and hers – in a new documentary

Book clubs are de rigour in 2026 – and a new variation of it-girl has spawned: ‘Litfluencers’ officially have the social cache to boot. But amongst Dua Lipa, Kaia Gerber and Reese Witherspoon, one bibliophile stands out: Queen Camilla.

The royal’s literary credentials are long-established. She set up her literacy initiative the Queen’s Reading Room in 2021 and opened the Cliveden Literary Festival last year with a touching tribute to her friend, the much missed Jilly Cooper, during which she quoted a classic one-liner from Cooper: ‘I'm going to get absolutely plastered tonight, darling. I love you so much, I want to see two of you.’ The Queen ‘galloped through’ The Rutshire Chronicles and concurred, ‘I think nowadays people need some good fun’. The recipe for a good book club was ever thus. Now the Queen is revealing just how essential reading is to her life in a new documentary, by BBC Arts.

‘The Book That Changed My Life’ is, in the Queen’s own words, ‘one of the most unusual book club meetings I’ve ever attended.’ Alongside four other keen readers, including a former prisoner and a HGV driver, the Queen opens up about just how her love of books has shaped her life.

The Queen is an unabashed advocate for reading. She calls it ‘the best tonic in the world: you always come out feeling better.’ But it was her father, Major Bruce Middleton Hope Shand, who sparked her lifelong love of books. ‘My father started reading to us - I think that's where my love of reading came from. We were transported into all sorts of other worlds. I don't think our childhood would have been the same if we hadn't had books.’

But she had little idea of just how important books were to her father until she read his 1990 memoir, Previous Engagements. During the Second World War, Major Shand – a swashbuckling former cavalryman – narrowly escaped a fatal shot to the head, with the bullet going through one side of his face and coming out the other. He was captured at El Alamein in North Africa and subsequently held as a prisoner of war at Spangenberg Castle in Germany, where he spent much of his time reading through the camp's library. He eventually made his great escape during a forced transport march in 1945 and returned to Britain.

It was only when she read about this ordeal in his memoir that the Queen could make sense of his wartime trauma; an understanding she attributes to the power of reading. It brought her much closer to her father. She also credits reading as an essential part of her education. She left school at a younger age than her male peers (as tradition would dictate); it was reading that allowed her to continue to learn.

As she grew up, her literary tastes became more refined. Treasure Island was a childhood favourite, read to her by her father, and as a teenager she became ‘sort of obsessed by the guillotine’ thanks to Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities, his novel set during the tumultuous French Revolution. ‘I was mesmerised by the tricoteuses – these ghastly women sitting there knitting while everyone had their heads chopped off,’ she recalls.

She admits to keeping a copy of D.H Lawrence’s Lady Chatterly’s Lover under her pillow to read by torchlight. (The novel was banned until its landmark 1960 obscenity trial.) ‘You know, the minute something's forbidden, you want to get into it,’ she wryly remarks in the documentary.

She shares her love of reading with the King who has a penchant, she reveals, for biographies and P.G.Wodehouse. The pair often read for an hour before dinner, usually in silence, but not always. ‘Occasionally, when I’m deep in a book, I’ll hear him roaring with laughter - it’s very off-putting,’ the Queen says on camera.

The documentary is part of an effort to encourage reading in an age of declining literacy. Four in ten British adults didn’t read or listen to a single book over an entire year, according to the University of Cambridge’s research, as more and more of us scroll rather than read. We are marching toward the steep decline of something that truly binds us all together, as Queen Camilla illustrates over tea with her four unlikely reading companions at the end of the episode. As Queen Camilla says, ‘it has certainly enriched my own life beyond measure.’

The Book That Changed My Life, airs on BBC Two and BBC iPlayer at 9pm on 14 October.