Tickets are selling fast for Bridport Literary Festival, with some events already sold out – but there is still a stellar line-up of writers from all genres well worth seeing.

‘There is something to please everyone,’ said BridLit director Tanya Bruce-Lockhart. ‘It really is a literary festival to suit all tastes.’

The festival kicks off on Sunday 3 November at Sladers Yard, West Bay, with a rousing performance of Cider with Jessie, which sees The Ciderhouse Rebellion duo (Adam Summerhayes and Murray Grainger) joined by Adam’s daughter, the poet Jessie Summerhayes.

They collectively create an immersive and expansive collection of folk-poems, woven between and around spontaneously created music.

You can enjoy their latest work, Tales of Colonsay, inspired by stunning landscapes and awe-inspiring seascapes – a brand new journey in spoken word, deeply connected to the land.

The event is followed by the option of a delicious lunch from the Sladers kitchen.

On Sunday 3 November, Giles Milton will be in conversation with Sir Barney White-Spunner at Bridport Electric Palace at 2pm, discussing his book, The Stalin Affair: The Impossible Alliance That Won the War.

In the summer of 1941, Hitler invaded the Soviet Union, shattering what Stalin had considered an ironclad partnership with the Fuhrer. The Allied reaction was twofold: delight that there was now a second front and fear the Red Army would be defeated. In the wake of the Nazi invasion, writer and historian Milton explores how a select team of British and Americans, by befriending Stalin, could keep the fraught Allied alliance on track and forge a path to victory.
Poet Lavinia Greenlaw will be at Sladers Yard, West Bay, on Thursday 7 November, at 6,30pm.

Greenlaw is one of the country’s most celebrated poets, novelists and memoirists and The Vast Extent: On Seeing and Not Seeing Further 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.

She will also read from her Selected Poems which have established her as one of the most perceptive and original poets of her generation.

Journalist and broadcaster Andrew Pierce is at Bridport Electric Palace on Saturday 9 November at 10am, talking about Finding Margaret: Solving the Mystery of my Birth Mother.

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.
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: A New History of the Ancient World Through the Women who Shaped it that puts them at the centre of the narrative.

She is at The Sir John Colfox Academy on Thursday 7 November at 2pm.

Spy’s granddaughter and novelist Charlotte Philby is at The Bull Hotel on Tuesday 5 November at 12 noon.

Life seldom works out to what is planned. How much of this is due to circumstance and fate? When a telephone rings in a French farmhouse, Judy knows her past has finally caught up with her. Her daughter, Francesca, insists on knowing why there are so many journalists in pursuit of her.

Philby writes a gripping nuanced literary thriller which exposes the secrets and lies so many mother/ daughter relationships have to come to terms with.
Tickets are available online at bridlit.com or by calling in at Bridport Tourist Information Centre on 01308 424901.