It was both a joy and a privilege to attend Hay Festival 2025 as part of the Hay Festival Writers at Work residency, a creative development programme for emerging Welsh talent which is funded by Arts Council of Wales and supported by Literature Wales and Folding Rock. Without this support I would have been unable to attend the festival at all, let alone have the opportunity to benefit from talks and workshops given by a host of prize winning writers, publishers, and other industry professionals.
Personal highlights include talking about the future of writing and publishing in Wales with Kathryn Tann and Robert Harries from Folding Rock; Joelle Taylor giving me her own copy of her novel The Night Alphabet along with some invaluable writing advice; being able to share my own work in our public reading in the Writers at Work tent; seeing Jameela Jamil in conversation with Jordan Stephens; meeting Gina Rippon and Robin Ince and talking about my personal experience of ADHD and Autism. There are many more!
It’s been a week since I got home and it’s going to take a good while longer for it all to sink in. By the end of the festival I couldn’t even sleep through the night, because I had so many new ideas and not enough time to write them all down between events. During it all my fellow Writers at Work were there, supportive and inspiring, and since then we’ve been helping each other get through the post-festival low, sharing writing opportunities and words of encouragement, making plans to get together again as soon as possible.
It’s often said that writing is a solitary pursuit and this is kind of true in the sense that you are the only one who can get the words out of your head and onto the page. But there’s a whole process leading up to that point. All sorts of things feed into our writing, making it richer and more interesting. What we produce is a bit like a mushroom (stay with me here). What you see is the fruiting body, the visible part of something much bigger, underground and unseen. Events like Hay Festival are a concentrated dose of knowledge, inspiration, conversation, laughter, and hope, and they nourish this subterranean body. I’m going to move away from the mushroom analogy now, because it’s just occurred to me what best makes them grow! Perhaps a better way of putting it is that good writing does not come out of isolation. There is a romantic idea of the writer as a grumpy eccentric bashing away at a typewriter in some attic room, accompanied only by a bottle of whisky, and at the mercy of a fickle muse. This does us no favours. Yes, solitude is necessary sometimes, but so is a support system of people who are on the same path. You can celebrate wins together, and commiserate when things don’t go according to plan.
The writers I’ve met through programmes like Hay Festival Writers at Work and Representing Wales (the year-long writer development programme run by Literature Wales) help me to keep going despite personal challenges, and the general difficulties of writing as a career choice (an important note here: you don’t have to quit your day job to be able to call yourself a writer. If you write, you are a writer. Own it.)
One such writer is Anthony Shapland, who I first met at Tŷ Newydd Creative Writing Centre on our Representing Wales year. Anthony went on to become a Writer at Work in 2023, after which his novel A Room Above a Shop was published in March this year. I was overcome with joy to see him on the Debut Discoveries stage in conversation with Cynan Jones on the final day of the festival. Anyone who knows him will likely agree that Anthony is a kind, generous, humble and all round lovely person and I’m thrilled to see his book out in the world.
Above all, I’m proud to be part of such a mutually supportive and inclusive community of writers in Wales, and excited to see what the future brings. Hopefully, one (or more) of the Hay Festival Writers at Work on the Global Stage!
Rosy Adams is one of the Hay Festival 2025 Writers at Work, a creative development programme for emerging Welsh talent at Hay Festival Hay-on-Wye with the support of Literature Wales and Folding Rock, funded by Arts Council of Wales.
Rosy, a poet and fiction writer from Powys, was part of the second Representing Wales writer development programme in 2022/23, which led her to set up a Community Interest Company to organise and fund ongoing support for under-represented writers in Wales. She edited and contributed to (un)common: anthology of new Welsh writing (Lucent Dreaming, 2024). Her writing has been published in The Lampeter Review, Lucent Dreaming Magazine, These Pages Sing, Gwyllion and Poetry Wales amongst others. She is in the final stages of a collection of contemporary short stories influenced by myth and fairy tale, and she has a novel in development.