Hay Festival After hours
Experience Hay Festival live in a city near you. Hay Festival After hours events will tour the UK, widening access to the important conversations and performances that take place on our stages. This is a chance to experience the excitement of the Festival in one magical evening, a space where art forms collide and great minds meet.
Hay Festival After hours: Bristol
An evening of words, ideas and re-imagined worlds
– Bristol Beacon - The Lantern Hall
Hay Festival After hours brings together three of the most compelling voices in poetry, politics and cultural storytelling: Rana Dasgupta, Zakia Sewell and Vanessa Kisuule. From searing spoken word and lyrical performance to urgent global analysis and re-enchanting visions of Britain, this special event explores how stories shape who we are – and who we might yet become.
In After Nations: The Making and Unmaking of a World Order, prizewinning writer Rana Dasgupta explores a world in political freefall. As Western democracies weaken, autocracies rise, international law erodes and millions are forced into dangerous migration, the promises of the nation-state are rapidly unravelling. Tracing the nation-state from its origins to its global dominance, today’s crises are no accident —it’s time to imagine a new political order fit for a globalised world.
Richly detailed, urgent and told with remarkable clarity, After Nations is an essential text for anyone looking to understand why we seem to be losing our political hold on the world, and how we might try to restore it.
Rana Dasgupta is an English novelist and essayist that Le Monde named one of 70 people who are making the world of tomorrow. Among the prizes won by Dasgupta's works are the Commonwealth Prize and the prestigious Rabindranath Tagore Literary Award 2019 for his novel Solo
Zakia Sewell is on a quest for another Britain. Traversing the length and breadth of our island from Somerset to Scotland, she’s seeking out a different story – one that lies beyond divisive national myths and symbols.
In Finding Albion, Zakia uncovers an alternative spirit of Britain that is vividly alive today in otherworldly folk songs and ancient legends, in Celtic seasonal rites and mystic stone circles that punctuate our landscape. At summer’s peak at Notting Hill Carnival she hears cultural echoes that passed along the slave trade routes from the Caribbean and in the depths of a Cornish winter she asks if today’s new folk revival could unite our increasingly divided country? Finding Albion brings a hopeful story of Britain out from the shadows, giving us a deeper sense of who we are, and heralding the promise of a brighter future.
Zakia Sewell is a writer and documentary-maker, and BBC 6 Music’s newest DJ. Zakia will talk to author, historian and critic Colin Grant known for his insightful books exploring race and identity, his book Homecoming: Voices of the Windrush Generation, was a Daily Telegraph Book of the year 2019.
Vanessa Kisuule is a writer, performer and poet based in Bristol and is the host of BBC R4’s The Poetry Detective. She has won over ten poetry slam titles and was Glastonbury Festival's Resident Poet in 2019. She has worked extensively in theatre with Bristol Old Vic, Kneehigh Theatre and Pentabus and was the Bristol City Poet for 2018 – 2020. She has two poetry collections published by Burning Eye Books and her work was Highly Commended in the Forward Poetry Prize Anthology 2019. Her debut non-fiction book Neverland: The Pleasures and Perils of Fandom was published in September 2024 with Canongate.