FIVE-TIMES Booker Prize nominee Dame Beryl Bainbridge is to headline a season of arts programmes looking at how the Brontë sisters continue to influence people.

She is one of a series of leading writers and artists who have agreed to contribute to this year's Brontë Parsonage Museum contemporary arts programme.

It will also explore how contemporary writers influence each other's creative work.

And it will be something of a coup for the organisers who will be displaying for the first time letters between the former Poet Laureate, the late Ted Hughes, and leading British photographer Fay Godwin. Dame Beryl will be visiting Haworth in June during the week of the Brontë Society annual festival, to read from and discuss her writing.

Her latest novel is According to Queenie, a fictionalised account of Dr Johnson's friend Hester Thrale.

Also lined up is award winning poet and novelist Simon Armitage, who hails from Huddersfield.

He will be reading and discussing a selection of his work at West Lane Baptist Chapel, in Haworth, later in June.

Fay Godwin will be exhibiting some of her landscape work from her collaboration with Ted Hughes, who was inspired to write verse in response to her images.

The photographs of Yorkshire will be on loan from the British Museum.

Jenna Holmes, Brontë Parsonage arts officer, said: "The exhibition will also include previously unpublished manuscript correspondence between Hughes and Godwin."

The programme also coincided with the Brontë Parsonage Museum's 2008 special exhibition focusing on Emily Brontë.

Authors Bonnie Greer, Helen Dunmore, Patsy Stoneman and Toby Litt will talk about how Emily's novel Wuthering Heights has had a special influence.