Investigative journalist Paul Lashmar, Associate Professor of Journalism at City St George’s, University of London, will be in conversation with two writers at Bridport Literary Festival next month.

In Searching for my Slave Roots, Malik Al Nasir unravels the legacies of slavery, plantation economics and the wealth of a slaveholding dynasty that he himself descended from – both enslaved people and prominent slaveholders – and the nuanced ways that historic trauma plays down through generations.

Miranda Kaufmann reveals the sugar plantations of the Caribbean generated vast wealth, not only for men, but women also. Heiresses exposes how, for almost two centuries, generations of women became enslavers and plantation owners in their own right, and brought huge fortunes back to Britain.

Lashmar, who lives in Bridport, has been interested in the history of slavery since he developed a Channel 4 series in 1999 on Britain’s slave trade.

He has been on the staff of The Observer, Granada Television’s World in Action current affairs series and The Independent. He is the author, co-author or co-editor of six books, including an unauthorised history of the Plunkett-Ernle-Erle-Drax family of Dorset and their role in the British sugar industry, which was based on slavery in Barbados and Jamaica.

Spanning 500 years and 18 generations, Drax of Drax Hall: How One British Family Got Rich (and Stayed Rich) from Sugar and Slavery is based on painstaking archival research.

The BridLit event is in Thursday 6 November at Bridport Arts Centre at 3.30pm. Tickets from the arts centre website or from Bridport Tourist Information Centre, 01308 424901.