Author Kit de Waal, who comes to BridLit on 11th November, won The Bridport Prize two years in a row for her flash fiction.

The competition was established by Bridport Arts Centre founder the late Peggy Chapman-Andrews in 1973. It's now one of the most prestigious literary contests in the world.

De Waal won the Bridport Prize in 2014 with her flash fiction story Romans 1 Verse 29, Sins of the Heart and again the following year with Crushing Big. She returned as a judge in 2017.

Her first novel, My Name is Leon, was published in 2016 and shortlisted for the Costa Book Award and won the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year. It has been adapted as a one-hour film for BBC 1.

She's now in the spotlight with her memoir, Without Warning and Only Sometimes – Scenes from an Unpredictable Childhood.

She was on Radio 4's Start the Week recently discussing the city of Birmingham with Tom Sutcliffe, alongside Richard Vinen and Liz Berry. Her memoir was also a Radio 4 Book of the Week.

The memoir is stinging yet warm-hearted. In a household of opposites and extremes, and caught between three worlds, Irish, Caribbean and British in 1960s Birmingham, de Waal and her siblings knew all the words to the best songs, caught sticklebacks in jam jars and braved hunger and hellfire until they could all escape. 

Without Warning and Only Sometimes is a story of an extraordinary childhood and how a girl who grew up in a house where the Bible was the only book on offer went on to discover a love of reading that inspires her to this day.

De Waal's The Trick to Time, published in 2018, was longlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction, and she has also published a short story collection, Supporting Cast. She is editor of the Common People anthology, and co-founder of the Big Book Weekend festival. 

She'll be at The Electric Palace, Bridport, on Friday 11th November at 6:30pm, in conversation with Lisa Blower, an award-winning short story writer and novelist whose debut novel Sitting Ducks was shortlisted for the inaugural Arnold Bennett Prize, and longlisted for The Guardian Not the Booker 2016.  

Lisa is Senior Lecturer in Creative & Professional Writing at Wolverhampton University where she continues to champion working class fictions and regional voices.

Brave Hearted by Katie Hickman tells the extraordinary story of the women of the American west -from the hard-drinking, hard-living poker players and prostitutes of the new boom towns to 'ordinary' wives and mothers walking two thousand miles across the prairies pulling their handcarts behind them, Chinese slave brides working in laundries and Native American women displaced by the mass migration.

All had traits in common - extreme resilience and courage in the face of the unknown. These women were put to the test, in terms of sheer survival, in ways that we can only dimly imagine.

Hickman will be talking about her book, Brave Hearted – The Dramatic Story of Women of the American West, on Monday 7th November in The Bull Ballroom.

Katie Hickman will be talking at BridLit on 7th November.

Local author Nikki May has written a darkly comic and subversive take on love, race and family. In Wahala, Ronke, Simi and Boo are three mixed-race friends living in London. They have the gift of two cultures, Nigerian and English, and now in their thirties, they are looking to the future. When Isobel a lethally glamorous friend from their past arrives in town, cracks in their friendship begin to appear, and the women are forced to reckon with a crime in their past.

She'll be in conversation with Oliva Glazebrook in The Bull Ballroom on Monday 7th November.

Andy West will be talking to Prue Keely about his book, The Life Inside: A Memoir of Family, Philosophy & Prison in The Bull Ballroom on Wednesday 9th November.

Andy West teaches philosophy in prisons. He has conversations with prisoners about their lives, discusses their ideas and feelings, and offers new ways to think about their situation. As his students discuss the knotty problems of bad behaviour, forgiveness and freedom, West struggles with his own inherited guilt - his father, uncle and brother all spent serious time in jail.

Andy West will be talking about his book at BridLit on Wednesday 9th November.

For tickets, contact Bridport Tourist Information Centre in Bucky Doo Square (telephone 01308 424901 and email [email protected]) or online.

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