The founder and director of the Bridport Literary Festival, Tanya Bruce-Lockhart, has died aged 81. She “leaves behind a remarkable legacy”, said David Burnett, founder of The Dovecote Press and fellow trustee of the Bridport Literary Festival. 

Bruce-Lockhart moved to Beaminster in 2000, having worked in independent television as a researcher on London Weekend chat shows with people such as David Frost and Frank Muir. She went on to work with Melvyn Bragg as the producer of The South Bank Show, as well as art documentaries for Granada Television and the BBC.

In 2004, she was appointed director of the Beaminster Festival for Music and the Arts, “using her background and experience to turn it into a festival whose reputation extended far beyond Beaminster”, Burnett said. “She broadened its scope, increased its attendance, attracting both international and national artists to the small market town.”

That same year, supported by the sponsorship of local resident Venetia Ross Skinner, she joined forces with Mark Culme-Seymour, director of Eype Church Centre for the Arts, and Chris Huxley, director of Bridport Arts Centre, to bring authors to Bridport at a “particularly fallow time of year for the town” for BridLit. 2025 would have been Bruce-Lockhart’s 21st year as festival director.

Burnett continued: “Central to Tanya’s approach was her belief that books and reading mattered, that no one should feel excluded. She ensured that the festival donated to Read Easy, supporting adult literacy, and was the driving force behind an outreach programme taking writers into local schools.

“Over the past 20 years she has brought nearly 600 writers to Bridport, all of whom willingly sign their books and find time to chat to their readers. As well as inviting well-established authors, she went out of her way to encourage writers who were only at the start of their careers, many with their first books. The November festival has become one of the highlights of the Bridport year, attracting audiences who bring trade to the town and fill its cafes, bars and restaurants. Literary festivals were in their infancy when BridLit started, and a measure of Tanya’s success is the sheer number of other festivals that have since followed her lead.”

BridLit has been a charity since 2012, but “owes its success to Tanya’s hard work, relentless enthusiasm and refusal to take no for an answer”. Burnett described her as “a familiar figure in both Beaminster and Bridport, with a friendly word for everyone she bumped into”.

“During the week of the festival she could be seen hurrying between her base in the Bull Hotel and the Arts Centre and Electric Palace, books piled precariously under one arm. Writers and readers have lost a champion, the rest of us a Dorset Treasure,” he said. 

Funeral arrangements are yet to be announced but her son Jamie has requested donations in lieu of flowers to Ferne Animal Sanctuary, near Chard.