Words! Words! Words!

Patti and Kae in Bath

THERE is a (small) handful of seats left at Bath Theatre Royal on Sunday 7th July to see and hear Patti Smith, one of the iconic figures of the music world and named as one of TIME’s 100 most influential people in the worl. The pioneering American artist was inducted into the Rock & Roll…

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Lucky for some at Swanage

PURBECK-based writer Georgie Codd will host her first live night out in Dorset on Friday 13th June. In aid of Dorset Mind, it is based around her second book, Never Had a Dad: Adventures in Fatherlessness, which was published in 2024. The book attracted millions of listeners when it was previewed on the hit US…

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Is A River Alive? Robert Macfarlane at Bath Literature Festival

PRONOUNS have become weirdly political in the last few years – it is all-too-easy to cause offence by using the wrong one when addressing or referring to a person who has adopted “they” and “their” as their preferred form. Author, environmental campaigner, poet and philosopher Robert Macfarlane encounters the same problem in his new book,…

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Thought-provoking writers at Bath

CELEBRITY names may tend to grab the headlines at book festivals, but the real meat of the event will always be the literary writers, the Booker prize-winners and those whose books make us think, tell us things we didn’t know we needed to know, prod us into thinking more deeply or excite our imagination in…

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Luke Wright’s Joy of poetry

OVER the last quarter of a century, performance poet Luke Wright has built up a reputation as one of Britain’s most popular and entertaining performers, winning a host of awards along the way. His 2025 tour continues at  Poole Lighthouse on 15th May and East Quay at Watchet on 16th May. During his long career,…

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A new era for Windrose

WINDROSE Rural Media Trust has a new team at the helm, fir the first time in the more than 40 years since it was founded by Trevor Bailey, who has retired but will remain as a trustee. Three women have taken over the charity, which works across Dorset, Somerset and Wiltshire on educational, archival and…

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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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