Tickets for this year's Bridport Literary Festival will go on general sale tomorrow (Friday).

There is already great interest in the event, which takes place in venues around the town from November 6 to 12.

Stars from the stage and screen are joining top names in literature for the 18th annual festival known affectionately as BridLit.

They include actors Dame Sheila Hancock and Hugh Bonneville and award-winning novelists Maggie O'Farrell and Kit de Waal, whose memoir has just been featured on BBC Radio 4, travel writer Colin Thubron, environmental activist George Monbiot, singer songwriter Polly Harvey, politicians David Owen and Chris Patten, war correspondent Jeremy Bowen, Today presenter Justin Webb, veteran broadcaster Melvyn Bragg, gardener and novelist Alan Titchmarsh and celebrity chef Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall.

Sponsored by Dorset law firm Kitson & Trotman, Bridport Literary Festival will be hosting events at The Electric Palace, The Bull Hotel, Sladers Yard in West Bay, The Tithe Barn at Symondsbury, Bridport Library, The Sir John Colfox Academy and The Book Shop in South Street. 

Information about all the events is on the bridlit.com website.

General booking opens from 26 August at Bridport Tourist Information Centre, in Bucky Doo Square - telephone 01308 424901 and email [email protected] - where printed programmes are available, and online at bridlit.com

Highlights this year include Downton Abbey star Hugh Bonneville in conversation with Julian Fellowes, Sheila Hancock's gloriously irreverent memoir and Dorset's own PJ Harvey on her book Orlam, a poem-sequence of light and shadow and written in Dorset dialect.

Debut novelist Joanna Quinn, whose Dorset-based novel, The Whalebone Theatre, is receiving rave reviews, joins a stellar line up of authors including Kit de Waal, and her childhood memoir of her Irish, Caribbean and British upbringing in 1960s Birmingham, and Maggie O' Farrell on her new novel, the renaissance thriller The Marriage Portrait.

Poetry, children's events, politics, journalism, environmentalism, travel and nature writing are all represented at the festival.

You can follow BridLit on Facebook - facebook.com/BridLitFestival - on Twitter @BridLitFestival and on Instagram as @bridlitfestival