In 2024 The Bridport Literary Festival celebrates its 20th year.  The Festival was spawned from the Bridport Prize, established in 1973 and one of the first significant international literary awards for short story writing and poetry.   In 2004 a group of literary loving locals – including the then director of the Bridport Arts Centre, the director of the Eype Centre for the Arts and the director of BridLit – got together to ‘brew’ the idea of a celebration of literary voices. Under Tanya Bruce-Lockhart’s direction, the Festival has grown and expanded over the years and events take place at venues throughout the town and West Bay, attracting audiences from across the County and beyond.

The Festival became a registered charity in 2011 and is dependent upon the generosity of Sponsors and Donors and the Friends of the Bridport Literary Festival to sustain a high standard of programme of events while trying to keep ticket prices affordable. Once a prosperous centre of the rope and net making industry, Bridport has now reinvented itself to become a centre of excellence for Culture and the Arts.

This year Dorset County of Culture’s pilot initiative has designated Bridport as  Bridport Town of Culture with a programme of events running from July to December. BridLit is very much a part of this initiative and welcomes to the festival all those who read books and love literature.

Day Five: Thursday 07 November

Event 23 | Andrew Ziminski | Church Going

10am at The Bridport Arts Centre, 9 South Street, Bridport DT6 3NR

Tickets: £13.00 from Bridport Tourist Information Centre 01308 424901 or online Andrew Ziminski

Churches are many things to us: they are places of worship, vibrant community hubs and oases of calm reflection. To know a church is to hold a key to the past that unlocks an understanding of our shared history. Andrew Ziminski has spent decades as a stonemason and church conservator, often acting as an informal guide to curious visitors. Church Going is his handbook to the medieval churches of the British Isles in which he reveals their fascinating stories – a celebration of British architectural history.

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Bridport 24 Town of Culture | Joseph Coelho |  Schools Event

10am at The Sir John Colfox Academy, Ridgeway, Bridport DT6 3DT

Tickets: FREE from Bridport Tourist Information Centre 01308 424901 or online Joseph Coelho

In this interactive and fun session Joseph Coelho, children’s laureate 2022 – 24, and recent winner of the Carnegie Medal for Children’s Literature for his novel in verse, The Boy Lost in the Maze, will be talking about the processes of writing. He will invite local school children to join him in creating a range of different poems from silly similes to super sonnets. Joseph’s event uses poems from his Carnegie nominated poetry anthology Overheard In A Tower Block.

This is a special event for local school children but we warmly invite extra audience members, and especially home schoolers.

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Event 24 | Catherine Coldstream | Cloistered

12noon at The Bridport Arts Centre, 9 South Street, Bridport DT6 3NR

Tickets: £13.00 from Bridport Tourist Information Centre 01308 424901 or online Catherine Coldstream

After the shock of her father’s death, and with her family scattered, 24 year old Catherine Coldstream was left grieving and alone. A search for meaning led her to Roman Catholicism and the nuns of Akenside Priory. Cloistered takes us beyond the grille of an enclosed monastic world with its tight-knit community of dedicated women. Catherine describes her journey as a nun through the 1990s and the dramatic events which led to her flight from the monastery to a wider world of freedom.

Event 25 | Daisy Dunn |  The Missing Thread

2pm at The Sir John Colfox Academy, Ridgeway, Bridport DT6 3DT

Tickets: £12.00 from Bridport Tourist Information Centre 01308 424901 or online Daisy Dunn

For centuries, men have been writing histories of antiquity filled with warlords, emperors and kings. But when it comes to incorporating women, aside from Cleopatra and Boudica, writers have been more comfortable describing mythical heroines than real ones. Spanning 3,000 years, from the birth of Minoan Crete to the death of the Julio-Claudian dynasty in Rome, award winning classicist, Daisy Dunn, explores the stories of dozens of women in The Missing Thread that puts them at the centre of the narrative.

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Event 26 | Harriet Baker |  Rural Hours

2.30pm at The Bridport Arts Centre, 9 South Street, Bridport DT6 3NR

Tickets: £13.00 from Bridport Tourist Information Centre 01308 424901 or online Harriet Baker

Harriet Baker shares the story of three very different women, each of whom moved to the countryside and were forever changed by it. Following long periods of creative  uncertainty and private disappointment, each of the subjects is invigorated by new landscapes, and the daily trials and small pleasures of making a home. Rural Hours is both a paean to the bravery and vision of three pioneering writers and a passionate invitation to us all: to recognise the radical potential of domestic life in rural places.

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Event 27 | Barnaby Rogerson | The House Divided

4.30pm at The Bridport Arts Centre, 9 South Street, Bridport DT6 3NR

Tickets: £13.00 THIS EVENT HAS SOLD OUT

At the heart of the Middle East, with its regional conflicts and proxy wars, is a 1400 year old schism between Sunni and Shia. To understand this divide and its modern resonances, Barnaby Rogerson revisits its origins. The House Divided follows the narratives through the first caliphates and empires forged by Arabs, Persians and
Turks to the contemporary Middle East and explains how in 1979 this already complex world was jolted by the seismic shift of three revolutions – in Iran, Mecca and Afghanistan and why it is again at the centre of global crises.

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Event 28 | Lavinia Greenlaw |  The Vast Extent

6.30pm at Sladers Yard, West Bay Road, West Bay DT6 6EL

Tickets: £12.00 for ticket only or £30 for ticket plus one course dinner from Bridport Tourist Information Centre 01308 424901 or online Lavinia Greenlaw

Lavinia Greenlaw is one of the country’s most celebrated poets, novelists and memoirists and The Vast Extent is a beautiful and ingenious consolidation of a thirty-year body of work. In a series of essays, she presents a record of how thought builds and ideas emerge – aligning art and scientific scrutiny and exploring subjects as broad as early photography, boredom, seasickness, wonder, mountains and mice.  Lavinia will also read from her Selected Poems which have established her as one of the most perceptive and original poets of her generation.

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Event 29 | The George Millar Literary Dinner |  Sonia Purnell | Kingmaker

7pm at the Tithe Barn, Symondsbury,  Bridport DT6 6HG

Tickets: £80.00 from Bridport Tourist Information Centre 01308 424901 – THIS EVENT HAS SOLD OUT

Guest Speaker: Sonia Purnell
We are delighted to welcome biographer and journalist, Sonia Purnell, to this year’s dinner. Her biography of Virginia Hall: A Woman of No Importance – WWII’s Most Dangerous Spy and her biography of First Lady: The Life and Wars of Clementine Churchill and her first book: Just Boris: A Tale of Blond Ambition have all been bestsellers. Her latest sensational biography of Pamela Churchill Harriman – one of the most important and influential woman of 20th century politics, is undoubtedly her most engaging and revealing. Born Pamela Digby, a British socialite, Sonia reclaims in Kingmaker her legacy which has mostly been dismissed as secondary to the men that she was involved with. A life of intrigue, scandal, glamour and involvement with some of the biggest names in the second half of the twentieth century has now exposed her as one of the most powerful confidantes in international politics.

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