The Bridport Literary Festival 2018

Patrick Gale is one of the country’s most popular and distinguished novelists and we are delighted to welcome him to this year’s Bridlit to talk about his new best-seller.

Born on the Isle of Wight, where his father was Prison Governor at Camp Hill, as his grandfather had been at nearby Parkhurst, the family moved to London where his father ran Wandsworth Prison. After a formal education at Winchester College and Oxford University, Patrick claims he has never had a grown-up job. While working on his first novels he eked out his slender income with odd jobs as a typist, a singing waiter, a ghost-writer and increasingly as a book reviewer. Drawing in part on his boyhood, Patrick’s new novel Take Nothing With You explores a collision between childish hero worship and extremely messy adult love lives, which envelops the protagonist hero, Eustace, to confront his own emotional volcano.