Bridport Literary Festival: Who is in the 2024 line-up?

Amongst the authors talking at this year's 20th anniversary Bridport Literary Festival are four who have lived every page of their books. All are passionate about what they write about, acquiring knowledge born out of first-hand experience – a life lived. And that counts. You trust and believe them and are swept along by their enthusiasm for their subjects and the hope that others will share their pleasure. Even if you can't get to Bridport for the festival, which runs from November 3 - 9, do try and read these books, all of which I highly recommend.

On This Holy Island, A Modern Pilgrimage Across Britain by Oliver Smith

None of the four authors will have worn out more pairs of walking boots than Oliver Smith, whose book On This Holy Island, A Modern Pilgrimage Across Britain (November 5, 4pm, The Bull Ballroom) took him from Iona in the Hebrides to the Red Lady of Paviland in a cave on the Gower. Some are pagan. Ghost hunters outnumber the regulars at the Skirrid Inn on the Brecon Beacons. Smith is rarely alone on the Ridgeway, where hill figures, Bronze Age barrows and standing stones punctuate the miles. Others are well-worn pilgrim ways: to Lindisfarne, Canterbury, Walsingham. Smith's questioning of what sets some places apart and draws us to them is movingly described in his account of the 'Anfield Pilgrimage' linking Liverpool and Sheffield, the scene of the Hillsborough Disaster in 1989. Two he misses are in Dorset. The first is a recently mapped route following in the steps of St Wite, Dorset's patron saint, to Whitchurch Canonicorum, the 'cathedral' of the Marshwood Vale. The other is at Knowlton, where a roofless medieval church sits within a Neolithic earthwork. In recent years a grove of yews on its fringe has become festooned with ribbons, posies, scraps of paper, some with messages, some with prayers. There will be others, also new, the length and breadth of these islands, but what St Wite and Knowlton in different ways tell us is of the need for a spiritual dimension in an increasingly secular age, that the wish to make sense of our lives remains as potent as ever.

Church Going: A Stonemason's Guide to the Churches of the British Isles by Andrew Ziminski Knowlton ruined state is chosen by Andrew Ziminski in Church Going: A Stonemason's Guide to the Churches of the British Isles (November 7, 10am at Bridport Arts Centre) as an example of a prehistoric site being recycled for a new purpose. Whitchurch Canonicorum also merits an entry, for the robust Norman columns guiding the pilgrim to the shrine containing St Wite's bones. Ziminski begins in and around the churchyard, before explaining both the outside and inside of a church. A stonemason, with 40 years experience of restoration to draw on, there is barely a church tower he hasn't climbed, a crypt unexplored. There are few books that make you look at buildings in a completely fresh way, but this is one. Part of the pleasure is the simple way in which Ziminski picks apart the bones of a church, its architecture, features and furnishings, and breathes new life into them. Dorset examples are scattered through the book. Sherborne Abbey's magnificent fan-vaulting – 'a golden, tree like canopy that soars over the nave and choir' – shares space with my own favourite church, the tiny St Andrew's, Winterborne Tomson, which sits like an upturned boat on the edge of a farmyard and whose miniscule nave is brim full of bleached-oak box pews. The gallery in St Mary's, Puddletown, offers a way of telling the Victorian demise of the church band in favour of an organ, a change regretted but made humorous by Hardy in Under the Greenwood Tree. The author advises the Salisbury Diocese on conservation. In a book largely free of controversy, he is confronted head on in St Peter's, Dorchester, by the legacy of the slave trade in a marble tablet commemorating the brutal quelling of a slaves uprising in Jamaica: the tablet is eventually removed. Thankfully, the rare sculptural relief over the doorway in St George’s, Fordington, depicting the fearsome saint routing the Saracens in battle in 1098 has not shared a similar fate.

England: A Natural History by John Lewis-Stempel Churchyards are havens for wildlife, and their importance as a habitat for everything from bats to beetles and barn owls to butterflies is now widely recognized (Dorset Wildlife Trust run a Living Churchyards project). John Lewis-Stempel is twice the winner of the Wainwright Prize for Nature Writing. In its own way his book England: A Natural History (November 3, 4pm, Electric Palace) is also a pilgrimage, in this instance to a dozen places whose tapestry of habitats harbour England's rich diversity of flora and fauna: Richmond Park, the Sussex Downs, the Chiltern beechwoods, the River Wye, a Cambridgeshire village, the North York moors, the Norfolk fens and Broads, his own Herefordshire farm. Ideas and facts tumble from his pen. A deep affection for the English countryside permeates his writing. But Lewis-Stempel is no blinkered romantic. England opens amidst the sewage works lining the Thames Estuary and ends on the 'tourist-besotted' Cornish coast. But it is another of his special places, the heath at Arne on the Isle of Purbeck that is most relevant to Dorset. Lowland heath suffers from one fatal flaw, the ease with which it can be ploughed, built over or planted with trees. Alarmingly, 80% of England's heaths have been lost since 1800. Only 145,000 acres, or 20% of the global total, now remain, and of these nearly 15,000 acres are in Dorset. Inevitably, the Hardy of The Return of the Native is a brooding presence. So too is the story of the near loss of the heath's signature bird, the Dartford warbler. Yet the author is as much interested in quirky asides – twilight in Impressionist art – as he is in the differences between a stoat and a weasel or the reproductive habits of the adder, whose last southern stronghold is the Dorset heath.

LESS: Stop Buying So Much Rubbish: How Having Fewer, Better Things Can Make Us Happier by Patrick Grant Happiness to John Lewis-Stempel is the spring song of the woodlark, deer running across the heath on a 'cold clear morning in March'. How much more contented might all of us be if we followed his example and also took note of Patrick Grant's LESS: Stop Buying So Much Rubbish: How Having Fewer, Better Things Can Make Us Happier (November 9, 2pm, Electric Palace). Grant is well-known as a judge on the BBC television series Great British Sewing Bee and for his Blackpool-based sustainable clothing brand Community Clothing, which supports UK jobs through making and selling affordable well-made clothing. LESS is a passionately written jaw-dropping indictment of waste, shoddiness, and corporate greed. From a time when we grew and made no more than we needed, mending and cherishing what we had, to throw-away cheap fast-fashion peddled by 'influencers' LESS is best summed up in the author's own words: 'We buy an incredible amount of rubbish. We'll buy more this year than last year, and next year we'll buy even more still. We've more of everything than we know what to do with, yet we've never felt so dissatisfied with what we have.' 100 billion garments were produced in 2023, most from oil, 30% of which remained unsold and were dumped in landfill or burned – at the rate of one lorry load a second. Mountains of rotting discarded clothing are visible from space. Balenciaga sell a sweatshirt for £950 that costs £20 to make. A French fashion brand sells socks for £75 that cost less than 50p and for which the maker was paid 8p. Balancing solutions with hard-hitting home-truths, LESS should be on the school syllabus, in every boardroom, and its message hammered home until finally we see sense.