Dorchester Literary Festival

Lemn Sissay – Let The Light Pour In
2023-10-21 19:30 - 20:30 (Europe/London) | The Dorford Centre, 2 Bridport Road, Dorchester, Dorset, DT1 1RR, United Kingdom
For the past decade, Lemn Sissay has composed a short poem as dawn breaks each morning. Life-affirming, witty and full of wonder, these poems chronicle his own battle with the dark and are fuelled by resilience and defiant joy. Let the Light Pour In is a collection of the best of these poems, and a book celebrating this morning practice. ‘How do you do it?’ said night ‘How do you wake up and shine?’ ‘I keep it simple,’ said light ‘One day at a time.’

Lemn Sissay OBE is a poet playwright, memoirist performer and broadcaster. He has read on stage throughout the world, from The Library of Congress in The United States to Addis Ababa in Ethiopia, from the Opera House of Dubai to London Palladium. Lemn was awarded The Pen Pinter Prize in 2019 when his memoir ‘My name Is Why’ reached number one in The Sunday Times bestseller list.

Lemn was Chancellor of The University of Manchester until 2022 and is now Honorary Chair of Creative Writing. His Landmark Poems in public spaces can be seen throughout Manchester and London at venues such as The Royal Festival Hall as well as at The British Council in Addis Ababa.

Lemn was the first poet commissioned to write for the London Olympics 2012. He has judged many literary competitions including 2020 Booker Prize, The Gold Man Booker Awards, and The National Poetry Competition.

Lemn was named MBE for services to literature by The Queen in 2014 and in 2021 he received an OBE for services to Literature and Charity.

Tickets £12.00/£6.00 (student)

Cat Jarman – The Bone Chests
2023-10-21 17:30 - 18:30 | The Dorford Centre, 2 Bridport Road, Dorchester, Dorset, DT1 1RR, United Kingdom
In 1642, William Waller and his Parliamentarian army came to Winchester with destruction on their minds. They forced entry to the magnificent cathedral that had stood on the site for over 600 years and began to smash things.

In the cathedral’s holiest place, ten beautiful mortuary chests rested as they’d done since the 7th century. In search for treasure, the soldiers ripped open the lids and when all they found were bones, they flung them at the great West Window, destroying the 14th-century-stained glass with its sacred images of the Virgin Mary and St Peter. The desecration was total – blood, glass, bayonets, bones all scattered underfoot. The chests housed the mortal remains of West Saxon kings, saints and bishops; of Queen Emma of Normandy, William Rufus, Harthacnut, Edmund Ironside and Edward the Confessor. As the soldiers left, local people picked through the damage, gathering the glass and hiding the bone chests for safekeeping.

Six chests remain today – with a jumble of the original bones. In 2014 they were opened for the first time to anthropologists and archaeologist, photographed and catalogued so that the exact position of each individual item is a matter of record. Since then, cutting edge science, including isotope analysis, carbon dating and DNA analysis has revealed astonishing new insights. In Bone Chests, bestselling author of River Kings, Cat Jarman builds on evidence from these bones of the men and women who witnessed and orchestrated the creation of England, fuelled and fortified by the actions of invading and settling Vikings, to tell an unforgettable new account of this early period of history. This is Anglo-Saxon history in technicolour, with an important revisionist take on the role of women.

Dr Cat Jarman is a bioarchaeologist and field archaeologist specialising in the Viking Age, Viking women, and Rapa Nui. She uses forensic techniques like isotope analysis, carbon dating, and DNA analysis on human remains to untangle the experiences of past people from broader historical narratives.

Dr Jarman has contributed to numerous TV documentaries as both an on-screen expert and historical consultant, including programmes for the BBC, Channel 4, History, Discovery, and more.

Dr Cat Jarman will be in conversation with Allan Mallinson.

Tickets £12.00/£6.00 (student)

Adam Sisman – The Secret Life of John Le Carré
2023-10-21 16:00 - 17:00 | The Dorford Centre, 2 Bridport Road, Dorchester, Dorset, DT1 1RR, United Kingdom
Adam Sisman’s biography of John le Carré, published in 2015, provided a revealing portrait of this fascinating man; yet some aspects of his subject remained hidden. Nowhere was this more so than in his private life. Apparently content in his marriage, the novelist conducted a string of love affairs over five decades. To these relationships he brought much of the tradecraft that he had learned as a spy – cover stories, cut-outs and dead letter boxes. These clandestine operations brought an element of danger to his life, but they also meant deceiving those closest to him. Small wonder that betrayal became a running theme in his work.

In trying to manage his biography, the novelist engaged in a succession of skirmishes with his biographer. While he could control what Sisman wrote about him in his lifetime, he accepted that the truth would eventually become known. Following his death in 2020, what had been withheld can now be revealed.

Adam Sisman said: ‘There was much that I was obliged to withhold from my biography of John le Carré, published in 2015 while my subject was very much alive and looking over my shoulder. I came to realise that his turbulent personal life, which he wanted to keep private in his lifetime, was key to an understanding of his work. His son Simon urged me to keep a secret annexe for publication after his father’s death. The Secret Life of John le Carré is based on that annexe. It shows how le Carré conducted his affairs like espionage operations, running women as if they were agents. The tension involved became a necessary drug to his writing. The book illuminates a hidden life of secrecy, passion and betrayal. In the process it reveals a different John le Carré. Now that he is dead, we can know him better.’

Adam Sisman is the author of Boswell’s Presumptuous Task, winner of the US National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography, and the biographer of John le Carré, A. J. P. Taylor and Hugh Trevor-Roper. Among his other works are two volumes of letters by Patrick Leigh Fermor. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and an Honorary Professor at the University of St Andrews.

Adam Sisman will be in conversation with Danny Danziger.

Tickets £12.00/£6.00 (student)

Edward Stourton – Confessions
2023-10-21 14:00 - 15:00 | The Dorford Centre, 2 Bridport Road, Dorchester, Dorset, DT1 1RR, United Kingdom
The son of ex-pat parents in colonial Nigeria, Edward Stourton was sent back to Britain to be educated by Benedictine monks at Ampleforth, at the time when, it was later revealed, the school and monastery were the setting for serial abuse cases. He then went up to Cambridge, where his life as an undergraduate gave him access to a network of future ministers, judges and newspaper editors. As a young journalist, he reported first from party conferences and picket lines and then from war zones, witnessing the events making international headlines, from Haiti to Hong Kong, before returning home to join the infighting on BBC Radio 4’s Today.

During this time, the Empire has given way to the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement, men-only clubs have been replaced by Me Too, and instead of a choice selection of voices on a handful of radio and television channels, we have millions of voices on YouTube, Instagram, TikTok.The world has changed, and so has Ed. Brought face to face with the author of his obituary and his own inevitable mortality, Ed is prompted to reflect on the life he has led and the events that have shaped him.

In Confessions, he describes this remarkable journey with candour, humour and the insight that only forty years’ experience of writing and reporting can provide.

Edward Stourton has worked in broadcasting for over forty years, and regularly presents BBC Radio Four programmes such as The World at One, The World This Weekend, Sunday and Analysis. He has been a foreign correspondent for Channel Four, ITN and the BBC and for ten years he was one of the main presenters of the Today programme.

Edward Stourton will be in conversation with Kate Adie.

Tickets £12.00/£6.00 (student)

Anna Murphy – Destination Fabulous
2023-10-21 12:00 - 13:00 | The Dorford Centre, 2 Bridport Road, Dorchester, Dorset, DT1 1RR, United Kingdom
From the Fashion Director of The Times comes a wise, inspiring and invigorating guide to making the most of life as a grown-up woman – from the practical (how to dress your best) to the existential (how to feel your best).

At 50, Anna Murphy feels more visible than at any point in her life to date. Her new book, Destination Fabulous, is the toolkit you need to embrace your age and celebrate the wisdom and inner beauty that comes with it.

It’s not about impossible goals. It’s not about running a marathon (unless you want it to be). It’s not about denying the ageing process, nor attempting to erase its signs. It’s not about letting everything go, either. It’s about balance. It’s about the possible and the present. And it’s about the future you want.How do you lift and smooth your face naturally? Should you go grey, and, if so, how? How do you deal with menopause?

Anna combines her knowledge from years of writing about fashion and beauty with her openness to the alternative ways of thinking found in disciplines such as yoga and Chinese medicine. For her natural is always best.

As a leading fashion editor, Anna knows that clothing can be the ultimate route into surfacing the true you. She shares all her tricks for finding your way to a wardrobe that will transform not just the way you look but the way you feel. And she shares the highlights of her conversations over the years with super-stylish agers such as Iris Apfel and Miuccia Prada.

How have they got it right?

Drawing on the wisdom of writers as diverse as Pema Chodron and Eckhart Tolle, Dorothy Rowe and Osho, Nora Ephron and Mary Oliver, she writes about saying goodbye to what doesn’t serve you and welcoming what does; about forging relationships that work for you as well as others; and about finding your purpose, whether in your personal or professional life. Discover how the bumps on her road havehelped her find her way to her true path. Her hope is that this book will help you to find yours, too.As Fashion Director of The Times, it goes without saying that Anna Murphy is passionate about what we wear. The author of How Not to Wear Black believes strongly that the supposedly superficial act of choosing what to put on every morning can have a profound impact not just on how we look, but how we feel. Her years of writing and research, plus her own life experience, have also opened Anna upto fresh thinking around beauty, diet and exercise, and – overarching all of it – the best ways to live a life that is contented and fulfilled, especially as you grow old.

Anna Murphy joined The Times as fashion director in 2015, having been the launch editor of Stella at The Sunday Telegraph. She has interviewed the industry’s biggest names and done everything from wearing a frock made of bin bags to attempting the Angelina leg pop.

Anna Murphy will be in conversation with Lulu Taylor

Sponsored by Domvs

Tickets £12.00/£6.00 (student)

Miles Johnson – Chasing Shadows
2023-10-21 10:30 - 11:30 | The Dorford Centre, 2 Bridport Road, Dorchester, Dorset, DT1 1RR, United Kingdom
**Event Cancelled** We regret to say that this event has been cancelled. If you have purchased tickets, please contact us for a refund.

A true story of drugs, war and the secret world of international crime. McMafia meets Narcos and the dark side of globalisation set in the US, Italy, Colombia and the Middle East.A compulsive true crime thriller about modern-day international drugs trafficking, terrorism and geopolitical intrigue following an investigation driven by one DEA agent, Jack Kelly.

Three very different men battle to control their destinies as they hurtle through the hall of mirrors of the global shadow economy.

Jack Kelly, a veteran US Drug Enforcement Administration agent, tasked with following a trail of dirty money across continents from a top-secret investigative unit based in Virginia.

Salvatore Pititto is an ambitious Mafia capo working on a vast cocaine shipment who becomes unexpectedly pulled into an arms-smuggling conspiracy.

Mustafa Badreddine is a ghost-like master terrorist wanted by governments across the world who has been secretly dispatched to Syria for his final mission.

Each man, born in radically different circumstances in the 1960s, is in his own way grappling with the powerful and unstoppable forces that shape the world around us; forces which topple governments, send refugees fleeing across borders, and put guns in the hands of mercenaries and militias. Each has devoted his whole life to an institution-the DEA, the Mafia and the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah-and each will eventually be destroyed or betrayed by the thing they believe in the most.

Set during 2015 and 2016, as the global order began to implode under the pressures of the Syrian civil war and the European refugee crisis, CHASING SHADOWS looks back over the historical conflicts, events and personal histories that have shaped the lives of these three men. It’s a book that shows the betrayals, the disillusionment and the violence as Jack Kelly hunts down his targets.

Tickets £12.00/£6.00 (student)

Louise Minchin – Fearless
2023-10-20 19:30 - 20:30 | The Dorford Centre, 2 Bridport Road, Dorchester, Dorset, DT1 1RR, United Kingdom
Louise Minchin went from presenting BBC Breakfast to competing for the GB Team in Triathlon in World and European Championship. In Fearless she sets out to push herself even further. Over 17 chapters, Louise embarks on terrifying, exhilarating adventures across the UK and the world to tell extraordinary women’s stories and to test herself. She free dives under the ice in the dark in Finland with the first female to swim a mile in the Antarctic Circle; she cycles across Argentina with one of the world’s most famous female endurance runners; she swims the shark infested water of Alcatraz with two teenage sisters; she explores the dark and wild caves deep under the earth in Somerset, and more in the name of exploring what drives these incredible women, their motivation, resilience and determination.The book is not only a celebration of the bravery of these women, Louise is determined to bust the myth that only certain people can do incredible things and have their own adventures. In Fearless you will find women spanning all backgrounds, religions, ages, body shapes and sizes; older women, younger women, women with disabilities and more – all doing remarkable things that Louise wants to tell the world about. Fearless is a roller coaster of highs and lows, with fascinating and thrilling momentsincluding ones when Louise fears for her life. It will leave you feeling empowered and inspired to get out there yourself – fearless, in fact!

Louise Minchin is a much-loved TV presenter, journalist, author and athlete. She presented the UK’s most successful morning television programme BBC Breakfast for two decades. She is the host of the toprated podcasts, Push Your Peak and Her Spirit. Louise is Chair of the 2023 judging panel for the prestigious The Women’s Prize for Fiction. Throughout her career, she has used her profile and voice to champion women’s stories and to push for change raising awareness of the menopause, mental health, women’s safety and more. A lover of adventure herself, at the age of 45, Louise was inspired to take up triathlon after a BBC Breakfast challenge. Three years later she represented her age-group in the World and European Championships.

Tickets £12.00/£6.00 (students)

Julia Bradbury – Walk Yourself Happy
2023-10-20 17:30 - 18:30 | The Dorford Centre, 2 Bridport Road, Dorchester, Dorset, DT1 1RR, United Kingdom
Part self-help and part-memoir, this is the ultimate guide to walking yourself happy physically and mentally, by one of the UK’s favourite TV personalities.

There’s a lot of talk about how we all must connect more with nature. But what does that mean? How do you do it? And what does it do for you in return? Can something as simple as going for a walk really improve your life? The simple answer is: YES.Walk Yourself Happy will explain the elemental link between our own health – both physical and mental – and the natural world.Julia knows first-hand the profound impact of nature: it has helped her survive breast cancer, overcome infertility and continue through failed IVF treatments; it balances the soul and acts as a confidante and therapist. Through science-backed information, practical tips and Julia’s own story, Walk Yourself Happy will explore how nature can soothe anxiety and stress, how a mountain or a tree can keep you company in times of grief, and the importance of building nature into your everyday life, so you eat well, sleep better and move more.Walking, one of the most accessible activities for most of us, is the fastest and easiest way to embed yourself in nature. You don’t need expertise or equipment; you just need to put one foot in front of another. You don’t need an epic landscape either, you can walk down the street or in your local green space. Though, as you will learn from this book, a walk in the park is rarely just that.We all have shocks and surprises that stop us in our tracks, make us question who we are and why we are here. In walking, we have the power to change our pace. And when we do that, we can find union with nature, camaraderie with friends and a form of intimacy with self.We can walk ourselves happy and we can walk ourselves healthy, and we can rekindle the innate bonds, all-but extinguished by modern living, that we have always had to our natural environment. We can start today.

Julia Bradbury is credited with revamping Sunday night primetime television on BBC One’s Countryfile, where she was a co-presenter for five years. She has an impressive career which has seen her launch three television channels and present numerous significant long term series including Watchdog, Top Gear and Countryfile. Outside her television life Julia is an ambassador for Keep Britain Tidy, The National Trust and a champion for Ordnance Survey. She co-founded The Outdoor Guide, which is an online resource and space for outdoor inspiration.

Her passion is the outdoors and more recently following her cancer diagnosis and surgery, she is dedicating her time supporting the benefits of healthy living and the virtues of nature therapy.

Julia Bradbury will be in conversation with Steve Harris

Polly Toynbee – An Uneasy Inheritance
2023-10-20 16:00 - 17:00 | The Dorford Centre, 2 Bridport Road, Dorchester, Dorset, DT1 1RR, United Kingdom
One of the most respected, prolific and razor-sharp voices in social commentary uses the prism of her extraordinary family to examine the true state of class in Britain.

While for generations Polly Toynbee’s ancestors have been committed left-wing rabble-rousers railing against injustice, they could never claim to be working class, settling instead for the prosperous life of academia or journalism enjoyed by their own forebears. So where does that leave their ideals of class equality?

Through a colourful, entertaining examination of her own family – which in addition to her writer father Philip and her historian grandfather Arnold contains everyone from the Glenconners to Jessica Mitford to Bertrand Russell and features ancestral home Castle Howard as a backdrop – Toynbee explores the myth of mobility, the guilt of privilege, and asks for a truly honest conversation about class in Britain.

Polly Toynbee is a journalist, author, and broadcaster. A Guardian columnist and broadcaster, she was formerly the BBC’s social affairs editor. She has written for the Observer, the Independent and Radio Times and has been an editor at the Washington Monthly. She has won numerous awards including a National Press Award and the Orwell Prize for Journalism.

Polly Toynbee will be in conversation with Kate Adie.

Sponsored by Porter Dodson

Tickets £12.00/£6.00 (students)

Tim Spector – Food for Life
2023-10-20 14:00 - 15:00 | The Dorford Centre, 2 Bridport Road, Dorchester, Dorset, DT1 1RR, United Kingdom
Food is our greatest ally for good health, but the question of what to eat has never seemed so complicated. Bestselling author and top 100 most-cited scientist Tim Spector has the answers in this definitive, easy-to-follow guide to the new science of eating well.

Tim Spector has pioneered a new approach to nutrition, encouraging us to forget misleading calorie counts and nutritional breakdowns. In Food for Life he draws on over a decade of cutting-edge scientific research, along with his own personal insights, to deliver a new and comprehensive approach to what we should all know about food today.

Investigating everything from environmental impact and food fraud to allergies and deceptive labelling, Spector also shows us the many wondrous and surprising properties of everyday foods, which scientists are only just beginning to understand.

Empowering and practical, Food for Life is nothing less than a new approach to how to eat – for our health and the health of the planet.

Tim Spector is a Professor of Genetic Epidemiology at King’s College London, director of the Twins UK study, Scientific co-founder at ZOE, and one of the world’s leading researchers. Food for Life, his latest book focusing on nutrition and health was a Times and Sunday Times Book of the Year.

Sponsored by Poundbury Clinic

Tickets £12.00/£6.00 (students)

Daniel Finkelstein – Hitler, Stalin, Mum and Dad
2023-10-20 12:00 - 13:00 | The Dorford Centre, 2 Bridport Road, Dorchester, Dorset, DT1 1RR, United Kingdom
A Family Memoir of Miraculous Survival

From longstanding political columnist and commentator Daniel Finkelstein, a powerful memoir exploring both his mother and his father’s devastating experiences of persecution, resistance and survival during the Second World War.

Danny’s mother Mirjam Weiner was the youngest of three daughters born in Germany to Alfred and Margarethe Weiner. Alfred, a decorated hero from the Great War, is now widely acknowledged to have been the first person to recognise the existential danger Hitler posed to the Jews and began, in 1933, to catalogue in detail Nazi crimes. After moving his family to Amsterdam, he relocated his library to London and was preparing to bring over his wife and children when Germany invaded Holland. Before long, the family was rounded up, robbed, humiliated and sent to Bergen-Belsen.

Danny’s father Ludwik was born in Lwow, the only child of a prosperous Jewish family. In 1939, after Hitler and Stalin carved up Poland, the family was rounded up by the communists and sent to do hard labour in a Siberian gulag. Working as slave labourers on a collective farm, his father survived the freezing winters in a tiny house they built from cow dung.

Hitler, Stalin, Mum and Dad is a deeply moving, personal and at times horrifying memoir about his parents’ experiences at the hands of the two genocidal dictators of the 20th century. It is a story of persecution and survival; and the consequences of totalitarianism told with the almost unimaginable bravery of two ordinary families shining through.

Daniel Finkelstein is a British journalist and opinion writer. A former executive editor of The Times, he continues to write for the paper. He has been Political Columnist of the Year four times and recently joined the board of Chelsea Football Club. He was appointed to the House of Lords in 2013.

Daniel Finkelstein will be in conversation with Danny Danziger

Tickets £12.00/£6.00 (students)

Sponsored by Bound by Books

(Julian Bunkall, Simon Conibear, James Emson, Nick Harland, Anthony Parson, Kim Slowe, Jonathan Walsh)

Jade McGlynn – Russia’s War
2023-10-20 10:30 - 11:30 | The Dorford Centre, 2 Bridport Road, Dorchester, Dorset, DT1 1RR, United Kingdom
Russia’s brutal assault on Ukraine has horrified the world. But many Russians appear to be watching an entirely different war—one in which they are the courageous underdogs and kind-hearted heroes successfully battling a malign Ukraine foe. Russia’s War takes us on a journey into this parallel military and political universe. Through interviews with dozens of officials, elites, and ordinary citizens from Russia and Ukraine, as well as detailed analysis of Russian social media, Jade McGlynn reveals the sometimes monstrous, sometimes misconstrued attitudes behind Russian majority backing for the invasion. Treating Putin as the symptom rather than cause of Russia’s many ills, Russia’s War illuminates the myths, memories and myopia fueling the country’s war on Ukrainians and descent into self-destruction.

Dr Jade McGlynn is a specialist in Russian media, memory and foreign policy at the Monterey Initiative in Russian Studies and Kings College London. She is the author of The Kremlin’s Memory Makers and frequently writes and comments for the media, including CNN, BBC, The Times, The Spectator, Telegraph, MSNBC, The Diplomat, and Foreign Policy.

Dr Jade McGlynn will be in conversation with Allan Mallinson.

Tickets £12.00/£6.00 (students)

Alan Titchmarsh – Chatsworth
2023-10-19 19:30 - 20:30 | The Dorford Centre, 2 Bridport Road, Dorchester, Dorset, DT1 1RR, United Kingdom
Follow Alan into Chatsworth’s irresistible world of visionaries, pioneers, heroes, villains and English eccentrics, and celebrate the men and women who have shaped the history of the estate over five centuries. With his passionate knowledge of both the house and gardens, as well as his long-established relationship with the Cavendish family, Alan is the perfect guide with whom to explore the Palace of the Peaks.

Featuring stunning, specially commissioned photography of the gardens and parkland, alongside long-forgotten images and memorabilia newly unearthed in the estate archives, this vivid companion, crowded with character and colour, is a book to treasure and revisit over and over again.

Alan Titchmarsh MBE is known to millions through his career as a television presenter of shows including Love Your Weekend, Love Your Garden, Ground Force, Gardeners’ World, The Alan Titchmarsh Show and Spring Into Summer. He has written more than forty gardening books, as well as twelve novels and three volumes of memoirs. He was made MBE in the millennium New Year Honours list and holds the Victoria Medal of Honour, the Royal Horticultural Society’s highest award.

Alan Titchmarsh will be in conversation with Paul Atterbury

Tickets £12.00/£6.00 (students)

D J Taylor – George Orwell
2023-10-19 17:30 - 18:30 | The Dorford Centre, 2 Bridport Road, Dorchester, Dorset, DT1 1RR, United Kingdom
The definitive biography of one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century from the award-winning writer and critic, D.J. Taylor.

Over seventy years since his premature death, George Orwell (1903-50) has become one of the most significant figures in western literature. His two dystopian masterpieces, Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) have together sold over 100 million copies. Even now, he continues to exert a decisive influence on our understanding of international power-politics.

D.J. Taylor’s new biography, the first full- length study for 20 years, draws on a wide range of previously unseen material – newly-discovered letters to old girlfriends and professional colleagues; the recollections of the dwindling band of people who knew him, new information about his life in the early 1930s – to produce a definitive portrait of this complex, driven and self-mythologising man.

D.J. Taylor’s previous biography Orwell: The Life won the 2003 Whitbread Prize for Biography. His other works of non-fiction include Thackeray (1999), Bright Young People: The Rise and Fall of a Generation 1918-1940 (2007), The Prose Factory: Literary Life in England Since 1918 (2016) and Lost Girls: Love, War and Literature 1939–1951 (2019). He has written a dozen novels, including English Settlement (1996), which won a Grinzane Cavour Prize, Trespass (1998) and Derby Day (2011), both of which were longlisted for the Man Booker Prize. His most recent books are the short story collection Stewkey Blues (2022) and Critic at Large: Essays and Reviews 2010-2022 (2023). His journalism appears in a variety of publications on both sides of the Atlantic, including the Times Literary Supplement, the Guardian, the New Criterion, the Critic and Private Eye. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and lives in Norwich with his wife, the novelist Rachel Hore.

D J Taylor will be in conversation with Jason Goodwin.

Tickets £12.00/£6.00 (students)

Ferdinand Mount – Big Caesars and Little Caesars
2023-10-19 16:00 - 17:00 | The Dorford Centre, 2 Bridport Road, Dorchester, Dorset, DT1 1RR, United Kingdom
How They Rise and How They Fall: From Julius Caesar to Boris Johnson

Who said that dictatorship was dead? The world today is full of Strong Men and their imitators. Caesarism is alive and well. Yet in modern times it’s become a strangely neglected subject. Ferdinand Mount opens up a fascinating exploration of how and why Caesars seize power and why they fall.

There is a comforting illusion shared by historians and political commentators from Fukuyama back to Macaulay, Mill and Marx, that history progresses in a nice straight line towards liberal democracy or socialism, despite the odd hiccup.

In reality, every democracy, however sophisticated or stable it may look, has been attacked or actually destroyed by a would-be Caesar, from Ancient Greece to the present day. Marx was wrong. This Caesarism is not an absurd throwback, it is an ever-present danger.

There are Big Caesars who set out to achieve total social control and Little Caesars who merely want to run an agreeable kleptocracy without opposition: from Julius Caesar and Oliver Cromwell through Napoleon and Bolivar, to Mussolini, Salazar, De Gaulle and Trump. The saga of Boris Johnson and Brexit frequently crops up in this author’s narrative as a vivid, if Lilliputian instance of the same phenomenon.

The final part of this book describes how and why would-be Caesars come to grief, from the Gunpowder Plot to Trump’s march on the Capitol and the ejection of Boris Johnson by his own MPs, and ends with a defence of the grubby glories of parliamentary politics and a thought-provoking roadmap of the way back to constitutional government.

Ferdinand Mount was born in 1939, the son of a steeplechase jockey, and brought up on Salisbury Plain. After being educated at Eton and Oxford, he made various false starts as a children’s nanny, a gossip columnist, bagman to Selwyn Lloyd, and leader-writer on the doomed Daily Sketch. He later surfaced, slightly to his surprise and everyone else’s, as head of Margaret Thatcher’s Policy Unit and later editor of The Times Literary Supplement. He is married with three children and three grandchildren and has lived in Islington for half his life. Apart from political columns and essays, he has written a six-volume series of novels, A Chronicle of Modern Twilight, which began with The Man Who Rode Ampersand, based on his father’s racing life, and included Of Love And Asthma (he is a temporarily retired asthmatic), which won the Hawthornden Prize for 1992. He also writes what he calls Tales of History and Imagination, including Umbrella, which the historian Niall Ferguson called ‘quite simply the best historical novel in years’.

Sponsored by John and Jenny Patterson

Tickets £12.00/£6.00

Justine Picardie – Chanel The Legend and the Life
2023-10-19 14:00 - 15:00 | The Dorford Centre, 2 Bridport Road, Dorchester, Dorset, DT1 1RR, United Kingdom
Justine Picardie spent years puzzling over the truth about Coco Chanel, peeling away the accretions of romance and lies. Since its publication in 2010, hers has become the definitive Chanel biography. To coincide with a major exhibition at the Victoria & Albert Museum her new edition delves even deeper into the life and legacy of this eternally alluring woman.

Coco Chanel was an extraordinary inventor – she conjured up the little black dress, bobbed hair, trousers for women, contemporary chic, best-selling perfumes, and the most successful fashion brand of all time – but she also invented herself, fashioning the myth of her own life with the same dexterity as her couture.

While Chanel was supreme innovator and vendor of all things elegant and beautiful, what lies beneath her own glossy myth is far darker. Throwing new light on her passionate and turbulent relationships, this beautifully constructed portrait gives a fresh and penetrating look at how Coco Chanel made herself into her own most powerful creation.

Justine Picardie brings the mysterious Gabrielle Chanel out of hiding, to celebrate her great achievements. She examines Chanel’s enduring afterlife, as well as her remarkable life, uncovering the consequences of what she covered up, unpicking the seams between truth and legend, yet keeping intact the real fabric of her past.

Justine Picardie is the author of six acclaimed books. She is a contributing editor to Harper’s Bazaar, having previously been its editor-in-chief. She was formerly an investigative journalist for the Sunday Times, a columnist for the Telegraph, editor of the Observer Magazine and features director of Vogue.

Tickets £12.00/£6.00 (students)

Stephen Anderton – The Lives of the Great Gardeners
2023-10-19 12:00 - 13:00 | The Dorford Centre, 2 Bridport Road, Dorchester, Dorset, DT1 1RR, United Kingdom
The lives of 40 men and women behind some of the world’s most exciting gardens. Throughout history great gardeners have risen from all walks of life. Some have been aristocratic amateur gardeners, others professional designers with an international practice. Some have come to garden-making from sister arts such as sculpture or painting; others have been hands-on nurserymen or botanists. What they all have in common is the ability to take an idea and develop it in a new manner relevant to their times.

The book contains four sections. ‘Gardens of Ideas’ moves from the politically allusive gardens of 18th-century England made by men such as William Kent, to Charles Jencks’s Scottish garden inspired by 21st-century cosmography. ‘Gardens of Straight Lines’ explores the lives of the great formalist gardeners, from Le Nôtre at Versailles to the rational English minimalism of contemporary designer Christopher BradleyHole. ‘Gardens of Curves’ begins with that great exponent of the English landscapegarden, ‘Capability’ Brown, and leads to the extraordinary Brazilian designer Roberto Burle Marx. Finally, ‘Gardens of Plantsmanship’ moves from the father of naturalistic planting, William Robinson, to the sweeping prairies of New York’s favourite Dutch designer, Piet Oudolf.

Author Stephen Anderton is a journalist, author, lecturer and broadcaster. Best known as The Times’s long-standing writer on gardens and gardening (for which he has three times won first prize in the Garden Writers’ Guild awards), he worked for many years on the care and restoration of historic gardens, latterly as National Gardens Manager for English Heritage. His books include Discovering Welsh Gardens and Christopher Lloyd: Great Dixter.

Stephen Anderton will be in conversation with Vanessa Berridge.

Sponsored by Monart Spa

Tickets £12.00/£6.00 (students)

James Naughtie – Desert Island Books
2023-10-18 18:00 - 19:00 | The Dorford Centre, 2 Bridport Road, Dorchester, Dorset, DT1 1RR, United Kingdom
**Event Cancelled** We regret to say that this event has been cancelled. If you have purchased tickets, please contact us for a refund.

One of our most treasured BBC broadcasters, a lover of literature, host of BBC Radio 4’s Book Club, and chair for the Man Booker Prize jury, James Naughtie chooses six books that have influenced him and inspired him through his life, in conversation with Paul Atterbury.

James Naughtie will also discuss his latest novel: The Spy Across The Water following Will Flemyng on a dangerous journey into his clandestine past, from conflict in Ireland to the long shadows of the Cold War, in an electric story of courage and betrayal.

James Naughtie was a popular presenter of Radio 4’s flagship Today programme. He is also a noted authority on classical music and opera. He fronted coverage of The Proms for more than a decade, and published The Making of Music – putting 1,000 years of composers and their works into proper historical context. His own publications include The Rivals, which exposed the truth about the relationship between Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, and his first novel, The Madness of July.

James Naughtie will be in conversation with Paul Atterbury.

Tickets £12.00/£6.00 (students)

Nigel Biggar – Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning
2023-10-18 16:00 - 17:00 | The Dorford Centre, 2 Bridport Road, Dorchester, Dorset, DT1 1RR, United Kingdom
A RIGOROUS EXAMINATION OF THE WEST’S COLONIAL RECORD WHICH SEEKS TO BRING BALANCE TO OUR PERSPECTIVE OF COLONIALISM’S IMPACT

In the wake of the dissolution of the Soviet empire in 1989, many believed that we had arrived at the ‘End of History’ – that the global dominance of liberal democracy had been secured forever. Now however, with Russia rattling its sabre on the borders of Europe and China rising to challenge the post-1945 world order, the liberal West faces major threats. These threats are not only external. Especially in the Anglosphere, the ‘decolonisation’ movement corrodes the West’s self-confidence by retelling the history of European and American colonial dominance as a litany of racism, exploitation, and massively murderous violence.

Nigel Biggar tests this indictment, addressing the crucial questions in eight chapters: Was the British Empire driven primarily by greed and the lust to dominate? Should we speak of ‘colonialism and slavery’ in the same breath, as if they were identical? Was the Empire essentially racist? How far was it based on the theft of land? Did it involve genocide? Was it driven fundamentally by the motive of economic exploitation? Was undemocratic colonial government necessarily illegitimate? and, Was the Empire essentially violent, and its violence pervasively racist and terroristic?

As encyclopaedic in historical breadth as it is penetrating in analytical depth, COLONIALISM offers a moral inquest into the colonial past, forensically contesting damaging falsehoods and thereby helping to rejuvenate faith in the West’s future.

NIGEL BIGGAR is Regius Professor Emeritus of Moral and Pastoral Theology at the University of Oxford, where he directs the McDonald Centre for Theology, Ethics, and Public Life. Before assuming his professorship at Oxford, he occupied chairs at the University of Leeds and at Trinity College, Dublin. His most recent publications include What’s Wrong with Rights?, Between Kin and Cosmopolis: An Ethic of the Nation, and In Defence of War. He was appointed CBE in 2021.

Tickets £12.00/£6.00 (students)

Tim Marshall – The Future of Geography
2023-10-18 14:00 - 15:00 | The Dorford Centre, 2 Bridport Road, Dorchester, Dorset, DT1 1RR, United Kingdom
Space: the new frontier, a wild and lawless place. It is already central to communication, military strategy and international relations on Earth. Now, it is the latest arena for human exploration, exploitation – and, possibly, conquest. China, the USA and Russia are leading the way. The next fifty years will change the face of global politics.

With all the insight and wit that have made Tim Marshall the UK’s most popular writer on geopolitics, this gripping book shows that politics and geography are as important in the skies as on the ground, covering great-power rivalry; technology; commerce; combat in space; and what it all means for us down on Earth. This is essential reading on power, politics and the future of humanity. ‘Many of us still think of space as ‘out there’ and ‘in the future’. But it’s here and now – the border into the great beyond is well within our reach. Astropolitics is an integral part of international relations, especially for the major powers. I wanted to write a book putting space into its historical, political and military context, and to help us to imagine space as a place with geography which we need to understand. There’s also the sheer majesty and beauty of the universe, and in the book, from time to time, I stand aside, put aside the politics, and marvel.’

Tim Marshall is a leading authority on foreign affairs with more than 30 years of reporting experience. He was diplomatic editor at Sky News, and before that was working for the BBC and LBC/IRN radio. He has reported from 40 countries and covered conflicts in Croatia, Bosnia, Macedonia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon, Syria and Israel. He is the author of the No. 1 Sunday Times bestsellers Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps that Tell You Everything You Need to Know About Global Politics (which has sold over 2 million copies worldwide) and The Power of Geography: Ten Maps that Reveal the Future of Our World.

Tim Marshall will be in conversation with Michael MacCarthy.

Tickets £12.00/£6.00 (students)

Richard Cork – Encounters with Artists
2023-10-18 12:00 - 13:00 | The Dorford Centre, 2 Bridport Road, Dorchester, Dorset, DT1 1RR, United Kingdom
In Encounters with Artists, Richard Cork turns his impeccable skills as a critic and writer to tell the story of his encounters with some of the world’s most influential artists. From a serendipitous meeting with Pablo Picasso in Cannes in 1965 through his early days as a writer on the Evening Standard and his later role as chief art critic for The Times, Cork records the personal encounters that reveal the characters behind the art.

From individuals who can look back over a lifetime’s career, such as Louise Bourgeois, Roy Lichtenstein, and Jasper Johns, to younger artists encountered at the beginning of their careers, such as Tracey Emin and Damien Hirst, Cork reveals artists’ inner thoughts, anxieties, and creative ambitions. From a studio meeting with Lucian Freud to being driven through the Yorkshire countryside by David Hockney and given a tour of Soho drinking locations with Francis Bacon, Cork has found that “talking to artists can, in my experience, be surprising, revealing, salutary, testing, provocative, stimulating, and at times capable of overturning all my preconceptions about the individuals I encounter.”

Cork has played a significant role in popularizing late modern and contemporary art. In the words of art critic Louisa Buck, his “lucid, evenhanded and at times trenchantly critical judgement has been invaluable in helping to create the multiplicity of approach and vigorous debates of today’s artistic climate.”

Richard Cork is an award-winning art critic, historian, broadcaster, and curator. He has acted as a judge for the Turner Prize and curated major exhibitions at Tate, the Hayward Gallery, the Barbican Art Gallery, the Royal Academy of Arts, and other European venues. Previously art critic for the Evening Standard, then chief art critic of The Times, he broadcasts regularly on BBC radio and TV and has written several books.

Richard Cork will be in conversation with Paul Atterbury

Sponsored by Duke’s

Tickets £12.00/£6.00 (students)

John Wright – The Observant Walker
2023-10-18 10:30 - 11:30 | The Dorford Centre, 2 Bridport Road, Dorchester, Dorset, DT1 1RR, United Kingdom
When we go for a walk, whether in the countryside or city, we pass through landscapes full of natural beauty and curiosities both visible and invisible – but though we might admire the view, or wonder idly about the name of a flower, we rarely have the knowledge to fully engage with what we see. When we do, our sense of place is expanded, our understanding deepened and we can discover richness in even the most everyday stroll.

John Wright has been leading forays around Britain for decades. As an expert forager, he shows people how to identify the edible species that abound – but he also reveals the natural history, stories and science behind our surroundings. Here, he takes us with him on eight walks: from verdant forests to wild coastlines, via city pavements, fields and rolling hills, he illuminates what can be found on a walk across any British terrain, and how you might observe and truly understand them, for yourself.

Warm, wise and endlessly informative, with helpful illustrations and suggested routes, this book will help you to see the world around you with new eyes: no walk will be the same again.

Sponsored by the Duchy of Cornwall

Tickets £12.00/£6.00 (students)

Damien Lewis – SAS Great Escapes II
2023-10-17 18:00 - 19:00 | Dorset Museum, High West Street, Dorchester, DT1 1XA, United Kingdom
Million-copy bestselling author Damien Lewis has established himself as one of the most popular WWII historians, and this book builds on the success of SAS Great Escapes which has sold more than 40,000 copies in just over a year. SAS Great Escapes II reveals how SAS men crossed deserts, evaded hunter forces and escaped through enemy lands, overcoming insurmountable odds in WWII.

He tells the stories of:

Legendary SAS figure Bill Fraser and his six-man patrol, listed as Missing in Action after failing to return from a desert raid. Nine weeks later they emerged from a death-defying trial, being greeted as if they were ‘back from the dead’.

The eccentric yet gifted SAS commander Lord George Jellicoe and his small band of piratical raiders who attacked the heavily guarded German aerodrome at Heraklion, Crete, blowing up dozens of warplanes.

Malcolm Pleydell, the SAS medic who undertook a 1000-mile Saharan escape, being hunted all the way, facing horrific decisions as to who to save and who to abandon.

SAS founder David Stirling who attempted one of the most audacious missions of the war – to drive across the war-torn expanse of North Africa, to link up with advancing American forces.

John Tonkin commander of Operation Bulbasket, a 40-strong party tasked to halt in its tracks the notorious SS Panzer Division Das Reich.

Herbert Castelow who parachuted into France, charged to sabotage a key airbase escaping on the local village butcher’s bike

Damien Lewis’s extensive research captures these never-before-told stories, relying upon the generous time, help, personal archives, memorabilia and collections of the family members of those portrayed, as well as individual interviews, and access to newly-released wartime files held in the National Archives and elsewhere.

Damien Lewis worked as a war and conflict reporter for the world’s major broadcasters, reporting from across Africa, South America, the Middle and Far East and winning numerous awards. His books include the World War Two classics The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare, Hunting the Nazi Bomb, SAS Nazi Hunters, SAS Ghost Patrol, SAS Italian Job, SAS Band of Brothers, SAS Brothers in Arms and SAS Great Escapes. Many of his books have been made, or are being made, into movies or TV drama series or adapted as plays for the stage. The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare is presently being filmed as a major movie directed by Guy Ritchie, and starring Henry Cavill, Alan Richson, Henry Golding, Eiza González, amongst others. He has raised tens of thousands of pounds for charitable concerns connected with his writing.

Sponsored by Grassby & Sons

Tickets £12.00/£6.00 (students)

Peter Hart – Footsloggers
2023-10-17 16:00 - 17:00 | Dorset Museum, High West Street, Dorchester, DT1 1XA, United Kingdom
The Ben Shephard Memorial Lecture

An Infantry Battalion at War, 1939

The only way to truly understand what it was like to fight in the Second World War is to listen to the experiences of those men who were there. And often, there was nowhere more dangerous than on the ground.

In Footsloggers, Peter Hart reconstructs one infantry battalion’s war in staggering detail. Based on his interviews with members of the 16th Durham Light Infantry, Hart bears witness not only to their comradeship, suffering, dreadful losses and individual tragedies, but also their courage and self-sacrifice as they fought their way across North Africa, Italy and Greece. It might be said that they were an ‘ordinary’ battalion, but there was nothing ordinary about the experiences they collectively faced in the war against fascism. Most of the men were civilians until the onset of war threw them into the maelstrom; few of them ever considered themselves as natural soldiers. They had to learn from scratch the fundamentals of military discipline and acquire the manifold skills required of the infantryman. Some learnt quickly and prospered; far more struggled in this harsh environment, enduring untold privations and humiliations. But most did in the end become effective soldiers, capable of facing their opponentsserving the Third Reich.

This is a human look at the inhuman nature of war from the acclaimed author of At Close Range and Burning Steel.

Peter Hart was the oral historian at the Imperial War Museum for nearly 40 years. A prolific military history author, he has appeared in various television programmes, acted as a guide for the army, runs his own battlefield tour company and has a successful weekly podcast series Pete & Gary’s Military History.

Ben Shephard (1948-2017) was a writer, historian, lecturer and TV producer – The World at War and The Nuclear Age. Ben had a lifelong interest in the history of psychiatry and he studied the psychological effects of war in a series of highly regarded books, A War of Nerves – about PTSD, After Daybreak – the liberation of Belsen and The Long Road Home – the resettlement of displaced persons after WW2. This lecture remembers Ben’s life and work.

Sponsored by Sue Shephard

Tickets £12.00/£6.00 (students)

Her Honour Wendy Joseph KC – Unlawful Killings
2023-10-17 14:00 - 15:00 | Dorset Museum, High West Street, Dorchester, DT1 1XA, United Kingdom
Detailing six high profile murder and manslaughter cases over which they have presided, an Old Bailey judge reveals the inner workings of a crown court and how we should all be invested in the judicial process that transforms so many ordinary lives.

Every day in the UK lives are suddenly, brutally, wickedly taken away. Victims are shot or stabbed. Less often they are strangled or suffocated or beaten to death. Rarely they are poisoned, pushed off high buildings, drowned or set alight. Then there are the many who are killed by dangerous drivers, or corporate gross negligence. There are a lot of ways you can kill someone. I know because I’ve seen most of them at close quarters.

As one of just a few judges licensed to try murder cases at the Old Bailey, the author has presided over many of the high-profile cases that all too often grab our attention in dramatic media headlines – for every unlawful death tells a story. But, unlike most of us, a judge doesn’t get to turn the page and move on. Nor does the defendant, or the family of the victim, nor the many other people who populate the court room.

Peeling apart six dramatic murder and manslaughter cases, Unlawful Killings removes this distinction between ‘them’ and ‘us’. By detailing the inner workings of the Old Bailey and UK law, the author makes clear that each of us has a vested interest in what happens in the court room – especially when it comes to the death of a fellow human being. Any one of us could end up in the witness-box or even in the dock. And yet most people have only the sketchiest idea of what happens inside a Crown Court.

When Wendy Joseph move to the Old Bailey in 2012 she was the only woman amongst 16 judges and the third woman ever to hold a permanent position at the Old Bailey.

Wendy Joseph will be in conversation with Jason Goodwin.

Sponsored by Michael and Eve Bonham Cozens

Tickets £12.00/£6.00 (students)

Joanna Quinn – The Whalebone Theatre
2023-10-17 12:00 - 13:00 | Dorset Museum, High West Street, Dorchester, DT1 1XA, United Kingdom
A ravishing coming-of-age story set in the shadow of an oncoming war, The Whalebone Theatre fizzes with invention and compassion as an ‘unmarriageable’ girl elects to defy convention and find her own path through life.

“Maudie, why are all the best characters men?”Maudie closes the book with a clllump. “We haven’t read all the books yet, Miss Cristabel. I can’t believe that every story is the same.”

Cristabel Seagrave has always wanted her life to be a story, but there are no girls in the books in her dusty family library. For an unwanted orphan who grows into an unmarriageable young woman, there is no place at all for her in a traditional English manor.

But from the day that a whale washes up on the beach at the Chilcombe estate in Dorset, and twelve-year-old Cristabel plants her flag and claims it as her own, she is determined to do things differently. With her step-parents blithely distracted by their endless party guests, Cristabel and her siblings, Flossie and Digby, scratch together an education from the plays they read in their freezing attic, drunken conversations eavesdropped through oak-panelled doors, and the esoteric lessons of Maudie their maid.

But as the children grow to adulthood and war approaches, jolting their lives on to very different tracks, it becomes clear that the roles they are expected to play are no longer those they want. As they find themselves drawn into the conflict, they must each find a way to write their own.

Joanna Quinn grew up in Dorset where the best-selling Whalebone Theatre is set. She has worked in the charity sector and journalism. The Whalebone Theatre is her first novel and was a book club pick from the Queen Consort’s Reading Room.

Joanna Quinn will be in conversation with Helen Stiles

Sponsored by the Thomas Hardy Society

Tickets £12.00/£6.00 (students)

Anna Kent – Frontline Midwife
2023-10-17 10:30 - 11:30 | Dorset Museum, High West Street, Dorchester, DT1 1XA, United Kingdom
Anna Kent has delivered babies in war zones, caring for the most vulnerable women in the most vulnerable places in the world. At twenty-six years old, not yet a fully-trained midwife, she delivered a baby in a tropical storm by the light of a headtorch; the following year, she would be responsible for the female health of 30,000 Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh. But returning to the UK to work for the NHS, she soon learned that even at home the right to a safe birth was impossible to take for granted.

In Frontline Midwife, Kent shares her extraordinary experiences as a nurse, midwife and mother, illuminating the lives of women that are irreparably affected by compromised access to healthcare. This is at once an astonishing story of the realities of frontline humanitarian work, and a powerful reminder of the critical, life-giving work of nurses and doctors at home and around the world.

Anna Kent will be in conversation with Dr Helen Thomas

Sponsored by Summer Lodge

Tickets £12.00/£6.00 (students)

Poetry Slam with Angie Porter
2023-10-16 18:00 - 19:30 | Dorset Museum, High West Street, Dorchester, DT1 1XA, United Kingdom
An open mic event for local writers and poets.

Join us to hear up to twenty poets and writers read and perform their work. To sign up to participate at this event please contact us directly via contact@dorchesterliteraryfestival.com or just come along listen and enjoy a glass of wine.

Angie Porter is a local poet, performer and painter who brings creativity to the fore in whatever she does. Her monthly “She Speaks” poetry slams are hugely popular and Angie is actively involved in promoting new poetry work. Originally from Melbourne Australia, Angie is currently researching her local roots and the immigration experience from rural Somerset to outback Australia in the early 1800’s.

Tickets £12.00/£6.00 (students)

Angus Waycott – How to Self Publish Your Book
2023-10-16 16:00 - 17:00 | Dorset Museum, High West Street, Dorchester, DT1 1XA, United Kingdom
The Winterborne Journey

Angus Waycott is an author and narrator whose work has appeared in the UK, USA and elsewhere. During 15 years in Japan he wrote books about daily life and travel to remote areas, and was the voice of TV news, documentaries and characters in anime and video game productions. He has also worked as a script editor, copywriter, translator, lighting designer and staircase builder.

On 16th October he’ll be talking about his experiences in self-publishing. Is it worthwhile? What are the advantages? And the pitfalls? His own first attempt in 1981 did well enough to encourage further projects, some of which made more impact than others. But if success remains unpredictable, the digital age has at least made the how-to part of the job a lot easier than before.

His latest book, also self-published, is The Winterborne Journey, a lively and erudite account of the journey made by a small chalkstream just south of Dorchester. As well as insights into the placing of sarsens, long-ago medical treatments and the mystery of waters that vanish and then return, it uncovers a host of curiosities in geology, nature, farming, folklore, poetry, food, bats, lunatics, windmills, carving, fighting, fishing and dancing — all scattered along a few miles of streambank like scenes on a painted scroll. A tonic read for life’s quieter moments.

Tickets £12.00/£6.00 (students)

Cathy Rentzenbrink – Write It All Down
2023-10-16 14:00 - 15:00 | Dorset Museum, High West Street, Dorchester, DT1 1XA, United Kingdom
Why do we want to write and what stops us?How does the urge to express ourselves fight with the worry that no-one will care or that we will get in trouble?How do we identify and overcome everything that gets in our way so we can start making work?

Sunday Times bestselling author Cathy Rentzenbrink shows you how to tackle all this and more in Write It All Down, a guide to putting your life on the page. This is a kind, encouraging and stimulating book that explores the nature of memoir writing and offers helpful guidance on how to write your life on paper. Rentzenbrink will help you to discover the pleasure and solace to be found in writing; the profound satisfaction of wrestling a story onto a page and seeing the events of your life transformed through the experience of writing the self.

Perfect for both seasoned writers as well as writing amateurs and everyone in between, this helpful handbook will steer you through the philosophical and practical challenges of writing the self. Intertwined with reflections, anecdotes and exercises, Write It All Down is at once an intimate and enjoyable narrative and an invitation to share your story.

Cathy Rentzenbrink is an acclaimed memoirist whose books include The Last Act of Love, How to Feel Better and Dear Reader. Her first novel is Everyone is Still Alive and Write It All Down is a friendly and down to earth guide to writing a memoir.

Tickets £12.00/£6.00 (students)
