Hay Festival Winter Weekend 2023

Sebastian Faulks, bestselling author of Snow Country and Birdsong, returns to discuss his latest novel. The Seventh Son confronts prescient issues of surrogacy and medical ethics, weaving a literary thriller revolving around a megalomaniacal tech entrepreneur and a very special – and unusual – child.

When a young American academic Talissa Adam offers to carry another woman's child, she has no idea of the life-changing consequences. Behind the doors of the Parn Institute, a billionaire entrepreneur plans to stretch the boundaries of ethics as never before. Through a series of IVF treatments, which they hope to keep secret, they propose an experiment that will upend the human race as we know it.

Seth, the baby, is delivered to hopeful parents Mary and Alaric, but when his differences start to mark him out from his peers, he begins to attract unwanted attention.

The Seventh Son is a spectacular examination of what it is to be human. It asks the question: just because you can do something, does it mean you should? Sweeping between New York, London, and the Scottish Highlands, this is an extraordinary novel about unrequited love and unearned power.

Faulks talks to scientist, writer and broadcaster Adam Rutherford.

One of the UK’s leading geographers, Danny Dorling shows why we are growing further and further apart in his new book Shattered Nation. Looking at hunger, precarity, waste, exploitation and fear, Dorling looks at how Britain, once the leading economy in Europe, is now the most unequal and what we must do to save Britain from becoming a failed state.

Dorling is Halford Mackinder professor of geography at the University of Oxford, and regularly advises the government and the Office for National Statistics.

In Tim Marshall’s new book The Future of Geography, he tackles astropolitics, exploring how politics and geography are as important in the skies as on the ground, and what it all means for us on Earth.

Marshall is a leading authority on foreign affairs with more than 30 years of reporting experience from countries including Croatia, Bosnia, Israel, Kosovo and Afghanistan. He is the author of Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps that Tell You Everything You Need to Know About Global Politics and The Power of Geography: Ten Maps that Reveal the Future of Our World.

Offering powerful insights and giving us a new perspective on our world (and beyond), the pair speak to author and journalist Oliver Bullough.

Parish priest in Hay since 2001, Father Richard Williams trained as a professional musician at Trinity College of Music, London, studying piano, organ and composition.

In the late Georgian-Gothic setting of St Mary’s Church, Hay-on-Wye, he performs a live accompaniment on the Bevington organ to the classic 1923 silent film The Hunchback of Notre Dame, adapted from Victor Hugo’s novel of the same name.

Set in 15th-century Paris, the film follows Jehan, the evil brother of the archdeacon, as he lusts after a woman named Esmeralda and commands the hunchback Quasimodo to capture her. Military captain Phoebus also loves Esmeralda and rescues her, but an unlikely bond forms between Esmeralda and Quasimodo.

This is an extra performance due to popular demand