Festivals news

Silver jubilee for Wylye Valley Art Trail

THE millennium was not only the dawn of a new century, locally it marked the launch of a new celebration of visual art. Wylye Valley Art Trail, the brainchild of Crockerton-based artist Nick Andrew, celebrates its 25th anniversary this year, from Saturday 3rd to Sunday 11th May. In the quarter-century since the launch, this eight-day…

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Get your dancing shoes on!

BATH’s biggest free party kicks off this year’s festival on Friday 16th May in the new-traditional colourful way with music for every taste – acoustic, pop, blues, folk, funk/soul, jazz, blues and indie/rock through to choral and classical. You really are invited to put on your dancing shoes and let your hair down as the…

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Dorset Opera Festival’s 20 years at Bryanston

DORSET Opera Festival celebrates its 20th anniversary at Bryanston School’s Coade Hall this year, following its move to Blandford from its original home at Sherborne School. This year’s festival will run from 22nd to 26th July, and will include two formal dinners in Bryanston House. The opera programme is thrilling, with Verdi’s cruel but musically…

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Farewell to Tanya

TRIBUTES have poured in for Tanya Bruce-Lockhart, former director of Beaminster Festival and founder and director of Bridport Literary Festival, who died suddenly on Saturday 5th April at the age of 81. A familiar and much-loved figure in both Bridport and Beaminster, Tanya had been at the heart of cultural life in West Dorset since…

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Celebrating the art of travel writing

TRAVELLERS have been writing about their journeys for millennia – the Greek writer and geographer Pausanias, born in 110AD in Asia Minor, a province of the Roman Empire, is generally considered to be the world’s first travel writer. His 21st century successors have trekked to the remotest locations, into rainforests, across the Antarctic, up the…

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Happy birthday, Bath Literature Festival

ASK many people which is their favourite English city … the answer will often be Bath. It’s hardly surprising – a pearl of fine Georgian stone houses, terraces, circuses, crescents and streets, set in a spectacular valley, with some of the country’s finest Roman remains and a history of art, culture and literature. A roll call…

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History, crime, gardening .. on the page at Yeovil

YEOVIL Literary Festival 2024 has a stellar line-up with top writers, historians and poets coming to talk about and read from their latest works. Over the week from 18th to 27th October, the main festival hosts such household names as Martin Clunes, Wayne Sleep, Fern Britton, gardener Carol Klein, Clarkson’s hilarious sidekick Kaleb Cooper and…

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Politics and poetry, philosophy and food at Wells

WELLS Festival of Literature, one of the country’s longest established and most imaginatively programmed, runs this year from Friday 18th to Saturday 26th October, with speakers ranging from scientist and broadcaster Adam Rutherford to comedian Paul Sinha, favourite cookery writer Sophie Grigson to people’s poet Pam Ayres. Based at Cedars Hall at Wells Cathedral School,…

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