Vamos a Santa Rosa de Lima, uno de los pueblos que el HAY Festival ha escogido para su programa del HAY Comunitario. Está a una hora de Cartagena, en la provincia de Bolívar. En esa trastierra el calor es sofocante. Basta ver la reverberación tras los cristales del auto para adivinar que es un monstruo con lengüetas de fuego lo que nos espera afuera. Me dejo ganar por la añoranza del campo cubano. El viaje es un túnel del tiempo en el que veo los mismos gallinazos que en la Isla llamamos ‘‘auras tiñosas’’, la misma gente afanándose al borde de la carretera, los árboles con sus troncos a medio pintar de blanco, el ganado de mirada extraviada por tanto calor … esa sensación de tierra una y mil veces conquistada y siempre por conquistar.

My job is stories.

I am lucky enough to write and speak stories for the page, screen, stage and radio.

I have been all over the world because the stories I tell, visited festivals, spoken on panels, sat on Breakfast TV couches, recorded garbled sound bite promos down expensive camera lenses.

Supongo que hay muchos Hay, pero se pueden resumir en dos. Está el Hay del público que llena los actos, que aplaude, que se ríe, que celebra la ocasión de cruzar unas palabras con sus autores preferidos, y el Hay casi privado, el de los escritores invitados, esa comunidad efímera y extrañamente fraternal que durante unos días convive y ríe y celebra también la ocasión de cruzar unas palabras entre sí. Y de compartir mesa y mantel, o copa, en alguno de los cócteles y fiestas. Tal vez suene frívolo, y seguramente lo sea, pero mis recuerdos de los Hay pertenecen a ese rincón privado donde, por unos días, me siento parte de una comunidad paradójica, porque está formada por individualistas que dedican muchos esfuerzos a distinguirse unos de otros.

What a difference a few short years makes! I’d only ever been to one literary festival before I was published, and that was because a friend had a spare ticket. I thought that literary festivals weren’t for me. Not in terms of personal preference — in terms of personal preference literary festivals were absolutely for me — but rather that they weren’t for the likes of me.

According to The National Literacy Trust three-quarters of a million (770,129) UK school children don’t own a book. Of these children, those who receive free school meals, boys of all ages and teenagers are the most likely to say they have no books of their own at home.

The research report, Book ownership and reading outcomes, found that children who own a book are 15 times more likely to read above the level expected for their age and are four times less likely to read below the expected level.

I first came to the Hay festival in 2016 with Pen Cymru, I was overwhelmed by the vastness of the place and the diversity of events that was taking place. I was lucky to do a short performance piece with Pen Cymru and met wonderful writers including Oliver Balch and Owen sheers. I was interviewed and did a Shakespearean piece on King Richard the second which is currently available on the Hay Festival website, that was my first experience of the Hay festival.

Jenny Valentine is Creative Wales Hay Festival International Fellow 2017/18, travelling to each Hay Festival edition to meet with young people and explore the experience of adolescence. Here the award-winning writer offers her first dispatch from Hay Festival Winter Weekend 2017…

It is a clear, sharp, bright weekend in Hay.  The late Autumn light on the mountains reminds me that where I live is every bit as breath-taking as the extraordinary places we have visited this year.

One morning I asked Gillian, "Did you sleep well?" And she answered, "I lay awake half the night worrying about the world".

With Gillian you know that is the absolute truth, and this truth finds its way into her poems. She lives every poem she writes and breathes her life into each beautifully crafted line, every one as sharp and alive as the creatures that populate her world: the hare that stops and looks through the glass wall at her home, Blaen Cwrt, the pair of swans on the river in Cardiff. In Gillian’s world, finding a crushed fieldmouse becomes a meditation on community and conflict.

En route to Hay, the winter one,
Asleep in the rear of the festival Ford,
My bumpy dreamscape leaves me bored
And I wake to David Cassidy’s last words.

The aim of a book festival is never a modest one: it is to change people’s lives and so to make the world a better place.

This is a rich first visit to Hay for me as I’m speaking about a book that I know won’t disappoint. Sensation is about a year spent learning everything I could that makes sex into better sex, in the context of a loving and monogamous long-term relationship.  As a society we have a perverse relationship to sexuality. The promise of an idealised form of sex is used to sell products and the impact of the porn industry makes us believe that whatever we are experiencing it’s not OK. 

A magical winter weekend at Hay, starting, for me, on Friday afternoon with clear brilliant sunshine and a decidedly wintery bite to the air. As the sun dropped Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris conjured powerful spells to bring us otters, larks and hares. From there, Zillah Bowes, Rosey Brown, Imtiaz Dharker, Menna Elfyn and Pascale Petit read poems in English and powerfully in Welsh to Celebrate the 80th birthday, and brilliant nature poems, of Gillian Clarke.

With world events being what they are, the stimulations, provocations and consolations of Hay Festival have never felt so urgently needed. What a joy to come to one of the most beautiful places on Earth for the paradoxical experience of both escaping from and engaging with the big issues of the day. Hay has been my University of Life: I first came here as a curious 21-year-old; this is my fifteenth year straight and I’m beyond grateful for the myriad ways in which this singularly precious festival has shaped and enlightened my adulthood.

Coming to Hay Festival Winter Weekend was well worth the two days of travel. Even this morning, staggering off a freezing rail replacement bus service between Hereford and Worcester, stumbling through an icy industrial estate in search of somewhere with hot tea to spend a two-hour wait for the next bus, wearing my spare cardigan as a scarf, I regret absolutely nothing. You see, I got to be on stage with Rosie Boycott, talking about how to end violence against women.

It was a crisp, dark November evening when I first arrived in Hay-on-Wye for the Winter Weekend. I’d previously only known Hay during the glorious light evenings of late May, and the buzz of the big gathering on the green fields beyond the town.

The Festival has created its own season, and a wonderful, vivid one it is, but returning to a much quieter town, in winter, was something entirely different. It felt like I’d stumbled into a secret, snuggling up in The Swan, talking about books with an audience in close-up. It was conspiratorial and intimate.

Yesterday we drove from Ceredigion to Hay under cloudless skies. The Black Mountains and the Brecon Beacons never looked more beautiful, the Saddle, the Fan and Hay Bluff gold, the valleys ink-blue with shadow. Now we drive west between snowy peaks, and my iPad weather-forecast promises snow at home. The very thought makes me feel eight-years old, not eighty. 

My first encounter with Hay-on-Wye was when the late afternoon sun swooped in low as I drove toward the town. It was an amazing heavenly flare of yellow that, even with sunglasses on and the car’s sun visor down, still penetrated the windscreen. There were terrifying moments when I was totally blinded, with the car still moving. Was this Hay’s own type of sun? I’d never seen it this low in the sky, this blindingly bright. Perhaps it was an omen for how the Winter Weekend would go.

Reading a poem is like opening a door, and a good teacher can use it to open up whole new rooms in the mind. It’s often enough for the students just to know that poetry is not an inaccessible mystery but something that speaks about the world they live in, and that what they think counts.

I find that more and more young people are turning to poetry, as well as the shared experience of live readings. When I write a poem I have to read it aloud to know if it works. That’s the only way to check if the music is there, and if it sounds like a true voice.

The road to Hay Winter Festival was narrow - as wide as the van, sometimes tunnelled with trees, who's great roots narrowed the path even more. Copper teared beech and russeted oak and golden birch with spiked holly, all with bright creatures. half glimpsed. Bullfinches, goldfinch, chaffinch, sparrow, robin, wren, rook, crow and raven all flew around us, noticed, named - and the barest eye snagging of a gold crest.

The views across Hay-on-Wye were enchanting as I arrived at the first school to kick off the Hay Festival Winter Weekend and were only beaten by the beaming smiles of reception and nursery as they filed into the assembly hall to hear a reading of Luna Loves Library Day. I start the reading traditionally by opening the book illustrated by the fabulous Fiona Lumbers, but from there on in, very little is traditional about this reading as the children start to notice real live versions of the books from the story in their assembly hall.

My new series with the Natural History Museum, 10 Reasons to Love... begins with a sea turtle. My experience of these endangered species began, unexpectedly, during my work with Greenpeace International as a campaigner.

So there is a joy, so many years later in discovering a new way to put these ancient mariners in the limelight through my writing.