Bridport Literary Festival: Day 2

A revelation made by Jane Austen’s sister, ten years after her death, gestures to a brief, intense relationship one Summer holiday. Paula Byrne tells the story of this encounter, dramatising what has been lost to history. Jane’s relationship with two, very different, men brings about unexpected surprises; by Summer’s end, the course of her life will have changed forever. Set against the backdrop of Austen’s family, the tensions of the Napoleonic Wars, and naval and colonial politics, Byrne’s novel is the story of how our most celebrated romance writer first fell in love.

Award-winning author Sophie Pavelle explores nature’s symbiotic relationships. Investigating eight relationships trying to survive the climate crises, Pavelle asks: what can nature teach us about living together? Species form and sever alliances everywhere. Whether deep within temperate rainforests or the open ocean, nature thrives on relationships as glamorous as they are grotesque. Lowcarbon travelling around the British Isles, Sophie presents nature’s frauds, fortunetellers, and misfits.

Event 10 | James Fox | Craftland

5pm at The Bull Hotel, 34 East Street, Bridport DT6 3LF

Tickets: £12.00 THIS EVENT HAS SOLD OUT

Historian and broadcaster James Fox, guides us through the lost and endangered crafts that shaped Britain. Always a craft land, for generations, what we made defined our families and communities. Through the stories of often humble-seeming objects of both exquisite beauty and utility, Fox shows us how craft connects us to the land, becoming the material expression of our regional identities and cultures. In encounters with some of the last remaining craftspeople at work today, Craftland reveals a richer and more connected way of living

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Event 11 | Merlin Hanbury Tenison | Our Oaken Bones

6.30pm at The Bull Hotel, 34 East Street, Bridport DT6 3LF

Tickets: £12.00 from Bridport Tourist Information Centre 01308 424901 or online Merlin Hanbury Tenison

Merlin and his wife Lizzie leave London and return to his childhood home, a Cornish hill farm. Reeling from personal grief, they find the farm slipping into debt, whilst discovering that the damaged woods running through the valley are one of the UK’s last fragments of Atlantic temperate rainforest. So begins a fight to save not only themselves and their farm, but also one of the world’s most endangered habitats. Our Oaken Bones is a story about renewal, the astonishing healing power of nature, and our duty to heal it in return.

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Special Event | Angie Porter |  She Speaks – Open Mic Poetry Event

7pm at Waterstones,  21 East Street, Bridport DT6 3JX

FREE event

To celebrate events throughout the town, BridLit invites you to join this monthly Waterstones event taking place during Festival week. She Speaks in Bridport is Angie’s Bridport Women’s Only Poetry Group, which invites women of all ages to read a poem or piece of writing of their own, or to just join in and listen.

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Special Event | Joanne Briggs | The Scientist Who Wasn’t There

8pm at The Bull Hotel, 34 East Street, Bridport DT6 3LF

Tickets: £12.00 available on the door

Bridport Prize winner, Joanne Briggs, will be in conversation with Manni Coe, this year’s Bridport Prize judge, about her astonishing new book.  Renowned scientist Professor Michael Briggs – space expert at NASA, adviser to the World Health Organisation, successful Big Pharma executive – fell from grace amid a scandal that broke in 1986.  Soon after, he was dead, struck down by a mystery illness in a foreign country. Briggs left behind hundreds of people who believe they are victims of his negligence, and he left his daughter, Joanne. After decades of wondering who her father really was, Joanne decided to investigate, and in hypnotic prose, she uncovers the secret that shaped her father’s entire life and made his story more fantastic than any science fiction. As she discovered, Briggs’s greatest invention was himself.

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More information about the festival can be found at http://www.bridlit.com