Dorchester Literary Festival

Christopher Somerville – Britain’s Best Walks
2025-10-23 11:00 - 12:00 (Europe/London) | The Dorford Centre, 2 Bridport Road, Dorchester, Dorset, DT1 1RR, United Kingdom
Christopoher Somerville has covered the length and breadth of the UK on foot, and has written and broadcast about its history, landscape, wildlife and people for over 25 years. In this extensive new volume, he selects his top 200 routes from his hugely popular Times column, A Good Walk.

More than just a basic guidebook, this is a meditation on our relationship with the landscape and a celebration of all that Britain has to offer. From Cornwall to Shetland via Pembrokeshire and Barrowdale, this is the most comprehensive collection of walks in the United Kingdom available in one book, and features trails to suit all skill levels and references, whether you want a gentle ramble to the pub or something much more challenging.

Featuring stunning photography and using Christopher’s trademark wit and lyricism, this is the perfect book for ramblers anywhere.

Christopher Somerville is a Times journalist with 25 years’ experience of writing and broadcasting about country walks (and tougher hikes). He is the author of Somerville’s 100 Best British Walks, Where to See Wildlife in Britain and Ireland and Best Wild Places.

Tickets £12.00 (£8.00 Students)

Helen Carr – Sceptred Isle – A New History of the Fourteenth Century
2025-10-23 12:30 - 13:30 | The Dorford Centre, 2 Bridport Road, Dorchester, Dorset, DT1 1RR, United Kingdom
In a thrilling narrative account, Helen Carr sheds new light on a pivotal period of English history in the first book to cover the whole of the fourteenth century in over thirty years. Beginning with the death of Edward I in 1307, and ending with the deposition of Richard II in 1399, Sceptred Isle is the story of the last Plantagenets. Through the epic drama of regicide, war, the prolonged spectre of the Black Death, religious antagonism, revolt and the end of a royal dynasty, we encounter the human stories behind a fractured monarchy, the birth of the struggle between Europeanism and nationalism, social rebellion and a global pandemic.Helen Carr is a historian and writer specialising in medieval history and public history. Her bestselling first book, The Red Prince, was a Times and Sunday Times Book of the Year. Her second book, an edited volume of essays titled What is History, Now? has become primary reading for history students and enthusiasts globally. Helen also works in podcasting, television and journalism and is a fellow of the Royal Historical Society and a postgraduate researcher at Queen Mary University of London.

Helen Carr will be in conversation with Jenny Devitt

Tickets £12.00 (£8.00 Students)

Chris Chibnall – Death at the White Hart
2025-10-23 14:00 - 15:00 | The Brownsword Hall, Pummery Square, Poundbury, Dorchester, Dorset, DT1 3GW, United Kingdom
The villagers of Fleetcombe like to think of it as one of the most picturesque spots in Dorset: two pubs, a small playground, enough gorgeous cottages to keep a thatcher in business. It’s the last place you’d expect a grisly murder. But a body is discovered, tied to a chair in the middle of a nearby road, a stag’s antlers on his head. The victim is soon identified: Jim Tiernan, landlord of the White Hart pub. Detective Nicola Bridge is not short of suspects: in a small village, the pub landlord knows everyone’s business. And beneath the idyllic surface, the residents of Fleetcombe have plenty they want to keep hidden. Someone knows what happened to Jim Tiernan. Someone who drank with him in the busy pub the night he died. Someone who might just be dangerous enough to kill again. As the village’s many dark secrets come to the surface, can Nicola catch the killer before it’s too late?

Chris Chibnall is a BAFTA, Royal Television Society, Broadcasting Press Guild and Peabody award-winning screenwriter, executive producer, and playwright whose work has been seen, translated and remade all around the world. He is the recipient of the prestigious FIPA Prix D’Honneur, and honorary doctorates from Edge Hill University and Sheffield Hallam University. His television work includes Broadchurch,The Great Train Robbery, Doctor Who, Torchwood and Life on Mars.

Chris Chibnall will be in conversation with Roger Metha

Tickets £12.00 (£8.00 Students)

Sir Tony Robinson – The House of Wolf
2025-10-23 14:30 - 15:30 | The Dorford Centre, 2 Bridport Road, Dorchester, Dorset, DT1 1RR, United Kingdom
In Rome Father Asser is waiting to die. His idealism has landed him in a papal prison on false charges of heresy, but then salvation arrives in an unexpected form. Cardinal Balotelli also dreams of a better Europe, free from the ravages of the Norlanders. He has an important job for Asser, one that will take him home to Wessex, where King Aethelwolf’s power is fading, but none of his feckless children are fit to rule.

His eldest sons would rather fight each other than the blood-thirsty Norlander invaders. His daughter, Swift, is clever and cunning, but sometimes blinded by her ambition. Finally there’s Alfred, his once promising younger son, whom nobody has seen in years. Then Wolf meets a young priest with a proposition from Rome that could change everything.

Meanwhile in Lindisfarne Rhiannon is a slave who wants to see her Saxon captors punished for their crimes. So when she meets Guthrum, a Norlander hell-bent on wiping Wessex from the map, she sets out on a journey of destruction. So begins an epic struggle between greed and idealism, ambition and betrayal, freedom and tyranny. Because change always meets with resistance and, on the path to power, nobody can be trusted.

Sir Tony Robinson, actor, presenter, historical expert and star of Blackadder and Time Team, makes his adult fiction debut with this earthy, entertaining and gloriously witty recreation of the Anglo-Saxons, Alfred the Great, and the making of England.Sir Tony Robinson is one of Britain’s foremost faces of popular history through presenting 20 seasons of Channel 4’s archaeology series Time Team and as the creator of the worldwide icon Baldrick in Blackadder. In a varied and international career, he has won two RTS awards, a BAFTA and the International Prix Jeunesse. He started out at the age of 13 in Oliver! and has gone on to enjoy a long acting career in theatre, TV drama and sitcom, and an acclaimed presenting career of documentary and factual television. He is the author of over 30 children’s books and several adult non-fiction books, including an autobiography, No Cunning Plan. An ambassador for the Alzheimer’s Society since2008, Sir Tony received a knighthood in the Queen’s Birthday Honours 2013. The House of Wolf is his first novel.

Tickets £14.00 (£10.00 Students)

The Oldie Event: When Harry met Andrew – Harry Mount in conversation with A N Wilson
2025-10-23 16:30 - 17:30 | The Dorford Centre, 2 Bridport Road, Dorchester, Dorset, DT1 1RR, United Kingdom
Harry Mount, the Editor of The Oldie, will be talking to AN Wilson the award winning author of 60 histories, novels and biographies on subjects ranging from Queen Victoria, Charles Darwin and Jesus to John Betjeman, Leo Tolstoy and Adolf Hitler, and one of The Oldie’s regular columnists. His latest book, Goethe: His Faustian Life, reveals Goethe as a true polymath: the inventor of the psychological novel, a pioneer scientist, a great man of the theatre and a leading politician.

Andrew and Harry are great conversationalists, so you can be sure of a very lively hour.

Tickets £12.00 (£8.00 Students)

Sir Graham Brady – Kingmaker – Secrets, Lies and the Truth about Five Prime Ministers
2025-10-23 18:30 - 19:30 | The Dorford Centre, 2 Bridport Road, Dorchester, Dorset, DT1 1RR, United Kingdom
An explosive memoir from the heart of Westminster, lifting the lid on some of the leadership battles that have defined British politics for a decade and a half during the eras of five Conservative prime ministers – Cameron, May, Johnson, Truss and Sunak. From coalition to Brexit, Covid to Partygate, Trussonomics to the 2024 election, prime ministers came and went, while one man was at the heart of every leadership challenge, seeing all, saying nothing. Until now.

Sir Graham Brady became Chairman of the 1922 Committee in 2010. As leader of the group with power to choose a new leader of the Conservative Party, his hand held the axe over five Conservative prime ministers’ heads. Elected to parliament in 1997 as the youngest Conservative MP in the house, Brady comes from a lower middle-class background and fell into politics age 16 when he joined a campaign to save his grammar school. This book is the story of how a boy from Salford came to be the definitive Tory insider, offering insights into the character and choices of successive Prime Ministers and the administrations they led. Ultimately, it reveals where our most recent leadership failures originate, and asks hard questions about who will be fit to lead us tomorrow.Born in Salford in 1967, Sir Graham Brady served as a Shadow Minister under four Conservative leaders before resigning in 2007 in protest at David Cameron’s opposition to grammar schools. He has been Chairman of the 1922 Committee, the group which selects the leader of the Conservative Party, since 2010. During his tenure, Brady has overseen the election of three Prime Ministers – Theresa May, Liz Truss, and Rishi Sunak – as well as votes of no confidence in May and Boris Johnson.

Tickets £12.00 (£8.00 Students)
