Bridport Literary Festival: Day 4

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 Four: Wednesday 06 November

Event 17 | Christopher Stocks |  The Book Of Wild Flowers

10.30am at The Bull Hotel, 34 East Street, Bridport DT6 3LF

Tickets: £12.00 THIS EVENT HAS SOLD OUT

This essential wild flower selection – illustrated by Angie Lewin – is the history and science of the nation’s wild flowers. Author and journalist, Christopher Stocks offers both fascinating and unusual insights into a range of flowering plants alongside guidance on where to find them and how to cultivate them. This special study of our blooming British countryside will appeal to everyone who loves wild flora.

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Event 18 | Michael Sheridan | The Red Emperor

12noon at The Bull Hotel, 34 East Street, Bridport DT6 3LF

Tickets: £12.00 from Bridport Tourist Information Centre 01308 424901 – THIS EVENT HAS SOLD OUT

Xi Jinping rules over 1.4 billion people and the second biggest economy on earth.  He commands huge armed forces and runs a technology programme which claims to dominate the globe. His ambition is to take the place of the United States and to change the world order. Xi’s life is full of drama: plots, purges, power struggles and a pandemic. Michael Sheridan charts the rise of the isolated China of the 1950s to the modern economic and military juggernaut of today.

Event 19 | Lucy Hughes-Hallett |  The Scapegoat

2pm at The Bull Hotel, 34 East Street, Bridport DT6 3LF

Tickets: £12.00 THIS EVENT HAS SOLD OUT

Award winning biographer,  Lucy Hughes-Hallett, charts the meteoric rise and fall of James I’s favourite, the Duke of Buckingham. She transports us, with a novelist’s touch, into a courtly world of masques and dancing, gorgeous clothes, the art of Rubens and Van Dyck, genderfluidity, sex and appallingly rudimentary medicine. Lucy explores the beginnings of the Enlightenment, print media and public opinion as a political force and charts the vivid personalities of Buckingham, canny James I and doomed Charles I.

Event 20 | Rose Boyt |  Naked Portrait

4pm at The Bull Hotel, 34 East Street, Bridport DT6 3LF

Tickets: £12.00 THIS EVENT HAS SOLD OUT

At the back of a cupboard not long after the death of her father, Rose Boyt came across a box containing hundreds of typed pages, immediately recognisable as her half-forgotten diary of 1989/1990. Naked Portrait is a searing memoir of her relationship with her renowned father, Lucian, and explores her experience sitting for him from childhood until after her marriage. It is a viscerally honest account of a complicated father/daughter relationship, of its power imbalance and her adulation of him.

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Event 21 | John Bowers KC |  Downward Spiral

6pm at The Bull Hotel, 34 East Street, Bridport DT6 3LF

Tickets: £12.00 THIS EVENT HAS SOLD OUT

The Johnson era will be remembered for a series of scandals that severely eroded trust in the British Government. But this is not the overall reason for the decline in public standards. John Bowers fearlessly examines the institutions responsible for holding the government accountable, exposing how they have been bypassed by prime ministers and how the next goverment can and should restore integrity. Confronting failings presents concrete proposals for creating a more transparent and accountable system for those in power.

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Event 22 | Gill Barr| Creative Writing Workshop

6pm at The Bull Hotel, 34 East Street, Bridport DT6 3LF

Tickets: £12.00 from Bridport Tourist Information Centre 01308 424901 or online Gill Barr Poetry Workshop

Poet and tutor, Gill Barr, offers to share her insight and own experience of her writing journey in an uplifting Poetry Workshop,  aimed at both aspiring and experienced poets. In this two hour enlightening session,  Gill will guide creative writers through a series of tasks to open the imagination to the ever changing world, explore new perspectives and enhance the poet’s unique use of metaphor. Themes will be wide ranging.

Gill is happy to critique a poem of no more than 40 lines by each participant prior to the evening and is greatly looking forward to a lively debate on writing poetry.

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