SOMERSET-based author Jasbinder Bilan has followed up her Costa Children’s Book Award-winning debut novel with a delightful new story, which similarly draws on her family background in India close to the Himalayas. Jasbinder came with her family to the UK when she was still barely a toddler, but although they lived in a big city…
WINDROSE, the rural media charity, has set up an innovative project that combines live singing and old films, provided by internet technology for people in Wiltshire who are living with Alzheimer’s and dementia. Folk singer and song collector Amanda Boyd worked with Alzheimer’s Support Wiltshire to deliver interactive Zoom sessions, which included fascinating old footage…
THERE was a surprise for Bridport Literary Festival director Tanya Bruce-Lockhart when she took to the stage of the Electric Palace to thank speaker Sir Barney White-Spunner, after his talk about his book, Berlin – George Streatfeild, the High Sheriff of Dorset, in full formal regalia, came on to the platform to present her with…
EVENTS planned for Bridport Literary Festival continue through Wednesday 4th November, but director Tanya Bruce-Lockhart has had no option but to cancel the rest of the BridLit festival. Among the cancellations is James Rebanks, who was due at the Electric Palace on Saturday talking locally based poet James Crowden about his new book, English Pastoral…
RURAL media charity Windrose Trust has a new website – windroseruralmedia.org – where you can view old film, listen to audio and order DVDs. All Windrose’s projects were cancelled or postponed because of the pandemic, but a grant from the National Lottery Heritage Fund has enabled the charity, which was set up in 1984 under…
RURAL touring arts charities, including Dorset’s Artsreach and Cornwall’s Carn to Cove, have got together to create a film that captures the images, words, music and sounds that make up our rural landscape from the south west to Northumberland At a time of isolation, with no possibility of live events in venues, rural touring schemes…
MEMORIES of working in Frome, recorded by the Home in Frome group, can now be viewed online. The latest project of the community group, which records the changing life of the town, has been the mammoth task of turning the Working Memories book into a website, https://workingmemoriesfrome.co.uk/ The new website goes live on Tuesday, 27th…
THE Chalke Valley History Festival has been awarded £260,000 as part of the government’s £1.57 billion Culture Recovery Fund (CRF) to help face the challenges of the coronavirus pandemic and to ensure a sustainable future for the history festival and its Festival for Schools. The history festival, based in the Chalke valley in south Wiltshire,…
THIS year’s Wells Festival of Literature will go ahead from 16th to 24th October, with a hybrid programme of live and streamed events – dependent, of course, on any changes in the Covid-19 rules. The theme is unashamedly celebratory including the 50th anniversary of the Glastonbury Festival, the 300th anniversary of the birth of Gilbert…
THINK of gardens and Somerset and you probably picture the multi-period gardens of Hestercombe near Taunton or the Elizabethan glories of Montacute or Lytes Cary. But this beautiful and varied county also has a host of hidden private gardens, and these are the subject of Abigail Willis’s new book Secret Gardens of Somerset: A Private…