After a sell-out launch of The Bookery, a new pop-up literary event, organisers have scheduled another evening of readings, insights and discussion for Wednesday 24 June at the Royal British Legion Hall in Bridport. While the opening event focused on ‘laughter’, the second event moves to the opposite end of the spectrum, choosing ‘war’ as its theme.
The evening’s special guest is author and journalist Jon Lee Anderson, whose latest book, To Lose a War: The Fall and Rise of the Taliban, was published in February. The New Yorker’s Chief War Correspondent and a Bridport resident, Jon Lee Anderson, discusses his latest book and other frontline stories. Since joining the New Yorker in 1998, he has covered numerous conflicts in the Middle East and Africa, including in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan, Angola, Somalia, Sudan, Mali, and Liberia. He was the subject of a recent interview in the Marshwood Vale Magazine, which can be read here.
Jon Lee Anderson will be joined by writer and artist Jo Denbury, who will share memories and letters from her great-aunt, the war-decorated aeronautical engineer Beatrice Shilling. A pioneering WW2 aeronautical engineer, Beatrice Shilling OBE is remembered as ‘the woman who saved the Spitfire’.
The event will also include poetry by the late Pamela Gillilan, read by her daughter, Lesley. In her collections, All-Steel Traveller and The Rashomon Syndrome, Pamela’s moving autobiographical poems recall her youth as a WAAF volunteer on the airfields of WW2’s Bomber Command.
Doors open at 6.30pm on June 24. Tickets are £8. British Legion Hall, Victoria Grove, Bridport DT6 3AD. For tickets, press the link: https://square.link/u/zPtDogaL
