Bridport Literary Festival: Day 7
Event Details
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 Seven: Saturday 09 November
Event 35 | Andrew Pierce | Finding Margaret
10am at The Electric Palace, 35 South Street, Bridport DT6 3NY
Tickets: £15.00 from Bridport Tourist Information Centre 01308 424901 or online Andrew Pierce
Approaching fifty, journalist and broadcaster, Andrew Pierce, tells the moving story about his search for his birth mother. He had lived in an orphanage in Cheltenham for more than two years until his adoption by a loving family who nurtured him. As his career flourished and despite feeling a sense of betrayal to his adoptive parents, Pierce tentatively began to search for his biological mother, only to find that she had done everything she could to ensure he would never find her. Finding Margaret is a heartwarming and candid
tale of both heartbreak and reconciliation
Event 36 | Daisy Goodwin | Diva
12noon at The Electric Palace, 35 South Street, Bridport DT6 3NY
Tickets: £15.00 from Bridport Tourist Information Centre 01308 424901 or online Daisy Goodwin
In the glittering and ruthlessly competitive world of opera, Maria Callas is known simply as La Divina: the divine one. With her glorious voice and instinctive flair for the dramatic, she was the toast of the grandest international opera houses. Raised in Nazi-occupied Greece by an exploitative mother, her rise to fame came at a price. Daisy Goodwin brings to life a woman with extraordinary talent, unremitting drive and natural chic that made her a legend. By confronting the heartbreak of losing her lover Onassis to Jacqueline Kennedy, Callas found her true voice.
Event 37 | Patrick Grant | Less
2pm at The Electric Palace, 35 South Street, Bridport DT6 3NY
Tickets: £15.00 THIS EVENT HAS SOLD OUT
Clothes are important. They define who we are, impact our mood and influence how people think of us. Last year 100 billion garments were made worldwide, most workers paid virtually nothing and 70% from plastic textiles made from oils that do not not recycle. Less is Patrick Grant’s passionate and revealing book about loving clothes but hating how they are made. Judge of the BBC’s Great British Sewing Bee, he considers the crisis in the global fashion industry and how to set it right.
Event 38 | Bettany Hughes | The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World
4pm at The Electric Palace, 35 South Street, Bridport DT6 3NY
Tickets: £15.00 THIS EVENT HAS SOLD OUT
The names still echo down the ages: The Great Pyramid of Giza, The Hanging Gardens of Babylon, The Temple of Artemis, The Statue of Zeus at Olympia, The Mausoleum of Halikarnassos, The Colossus at Rhodes, The Lighthouse of Alexandria – The Seven Wonders of the World were staggeringly audacious and brilliant impositions on our planet. Award winning historian, author and broadcaster, Bettany Hughes gives us a thrilling narrative enriched with the latest archaeological discoveries and takes us on a journey through the landscapes of both ancient and modern time to explore traces of the Wonders themselves.
Event 39 | Simon Russell Beale | A Piece Of Work
6pm at The Electric Palace, 35 South Street, Bridport DT6 3NY
Tickets: £15.00 THIS EVENT HAS SOLD OUT
One of the nation’s finest and most beloved actors, Simon Russell Beale relates his life through a career playing Shakespeare. Ever since his appearance at school as a glamorous Desdemona, complete with false eyelashes, he has been captivated by the Bard. In A Piece of Work, Beale tries to get under the skin of the playwright and find out what interested him. Was Shakespeare an instinctive ‘conservative’ or, rather, gently subversive? Funny and touching about his own family and early life, Beale writes about the parallels with some Shakespeare characters as well as sharing his thoughts about the creative people he counts as friends.
Bridport 24 Town of Culture | The Stray Dog Jammers | Rhino
8pm at The Lyric Theatre, Barrack Street, Bridport DT6 3LX
Tickets: £10.00 from Bridport Tourist Information Centre 01308 424901 or online Rhino
Dorset based The Stray Dog Jammers present an adaptation of the post war avant-garde absurdist drama. Written in response to the upsurge of Fascism in the 1930s, Rhino explores the themes of conformity, culture, responsibility, logic, mass movements, mob mentality, philosophy and morality – all still highly relevant in today’s world. Its central character, Berenger, the non conformist who is the only one not to capitulate to the herd mentality, and the only one not to metamorphosize into a Rhinoceros.
More information about the festival can be found at http://www.bridlit.com
more
