at THE BRIDPORT LITERARY FESTIVAL 2022

Friday 11 November

To all our Friends and Supporters we have three very exceptional reasons to welcome award winning feature writer and journalist BRYAN APPLEYARD to this year’s BridLit.

Event 35

At 2.30pm he will be in conversation with MELVYN BRAGG about Melvyn’s Memoir, Back in the Day, an honest, poignant and captivating narrative of a childhood and youth spent growing up in the bustling market town of Wigton, surrounded by the inspirational landscape of Cumbria, to the moment he left for Oxford University and subsequently forged a glittering career in the media as both Champion of Culture and the supremo of television’s flagship arts programmeThe South Bank Show and BBC Radio 4’s addictive In our Time.

Time: 2.30 pm
Venue: Electric Palace
Tickets: £12

Event 36

At 4:30pm Bryan Appleyard will then give a short appreciation and celebration of his great friend JAMES LOVELOCK CH CBE FRS, the British independent scientist and originator of The Gaia Theory who lived locally at Abbotsbury and died last summer on his 101st birthday. Cited as one of the world’s top 100 intellectuals, the Gaia Theory considers the Earth a living and evolving system, striving to regulate itself so that contemporary life can flourish. Bryan and James became great friends over the years and shared a great many propositions.

Bryan will then be in conversation with local author, Boris Starling, about his newly published book THE CAR: The Rise and Fall of the Machine that made the Modern World, an event for those with an interest in social history as much as the petrolheads among us. More than any other technology, cars have transformed our culture. Almost everything we now need, want, imagine or aspire to assumes the existence of cars in all their complex systems. They have transformed our sense of distance and make the world infinitely more available – inspiring cinema, music and literature. They need roads, bridges, huge factories and global supply chains. We read this through the stories of the Ford model T, the brilliant-red Mercedes Benz made by workers for Nelson Mandela, and even in the salvation of the Volkswagen Beetle by Major Ivan Hirst.

Time: 4.30 pm
Venue: Electric Palace
Tickets: £12

And for our final FABULOUS FRIDAY event

Event 37

KIT DE WAAL, who already has a connection with Bridport as winner of the Bridport Prize in 2014 and 2015 and as judge in 2017, returns to talk about her latest book Without Warning and Only Sometimes. Her debut novel My Name is Leon gained critical acclaim and has now rightly found its way onto the school exam syllabus, as well as being adapted for a one hour BBC film. Here at BridLit she will be talking with fellow writer Lisa Blower about her memoir, telling stories of growing up with her siblings in 1960s Birmingham in a strict religious household, and looking for a way to break free through a love of books and writing. This work is both unflinching and heart-warming, and we are thrilled to host Kit in what promises to be a fantastic event.