On Friday night I was speaking on BBC R4's Front Row, presented by John Wilson live from one of Hay’s tents.
I was speaking with Julia Donaldson about the ways in which children’s fiction can inspire empathy: about how it can teach children to understand that behind each face is a mind as real and tangled and intricate as their own.
At the end of the programme Julia and her husband sang ‘The Giant Jumperee’, the text of their new book, and asked the panel to take on the animal parts. It was very good to see Hay founder Peter Florence as the elephant, and Pulitzer Prize winning author Elizabeth Strout act the cat.
In what was almost certainly the theatrical peak of my career, I was the baby frog. It crystallised for me why I love Hay; it’s a place of such scope and variety, where seriousness cohabits with a certain amount of lunacy.