Hay Festival 2015

Photo: Illustrations from the first trial of the book, by Laura Carling

Join Jamie on Sunday lunchtime for conversation, laughter and music. How’s your week been?

Broadcast on BBC Radio Wales every Sunday, 11.30am–12.30pm.

The winner of the 2014 Wellcome Book Prize introduces his wise and compassionate book Far From The Tree: A Dozen Kinds of Love. Ten years in the writing, it tells the stories of parents who not only learn to deal with their exceptional children but also find profound meaning in doing so. Chaired by Hay Festival President Stephen Fry.

The author of What Matters in Jane Austen celebrates the bicentenary of John Murray’s publication of Austen’s playful and profound masterpiece of self-knowledge.

Slow Fiction is inspired by the predella, the sequence of four or five pictures under a Renaissance altarpiece that tell the story of the annunciation, the adoration, or the pietà. If the large altarpiece painting is one moment in time, the predella shows the moments leading up to that key frame and sometimes what happens after. The artist Paul St George works with writers, translating selections of their writing into small sequences of sculptures making three-dimensional stories. Two of the first authors to be excited by this new way of bringing readers to writing are Polly Stenham, author of Hotel, and Jessie Burton, author of The Miniaturist: ‘To see my written words reimagined for a different audience, giving another take on the story-telling process – what we omit, what we emphasise, and what we leave behind – in a newly-configured presentation, is a true thrill.’

Set in 1960s Ireland, Tóibín’s new novel Nora Webster introduces one of the most complex and captivating heroines of contemporary fiction. He discusses the book and his new study On Elizabeth Bishop. He creates a vivid picture of the American poet while also revealing how her work has helped shape his sensibility as a novelist and how her experiences of loss and exile resonate with his own.

Photo: Brigitte Lacombe

Join children’s author Tom Palmer for a quiz about reading sport in newspapers, books and online, followed by a penalty competition, with one team winning the trophy. Tom is the author of 30 sports fiction books for children, including Ghost Stadium and Over the Line.

LoveReading4Kids and Barrington Stoke are working together to run a series of events dedicated to children with dyslexia. The authors featured in these events are published by award-winning publisher Barrington Stoke, whose books are renowned for their dyslexia-friendly features and layouts, cream paper and special font. These events will be creative, interactive and, most of all, fun.

Throughout the week of the festival LoveReading4Kids and Barrington Stoke expert staff will be on hand in the Make & Take Tent for advice and support for both adults and children. A selection of dyslexia- and reluctant-reader-friendly titles will be available to buy from the Hay Festival Bookshop.

100,000 years ago, at least six human species inhabited the earth. Today there is just one. Us. Homo sapiens. How did our species succeed in the battle for dominance? Why did our foraging ancestors come together to create cities and kingdoms? How did we come to believe in gods, nations and human rights; to trust money, books and laws; and to be enslaved by bureaucracy, timetables and consumerism? And what will our world be like in the millennia to come?

In Sapiens, Harari spans the whole of human history, from the very first humans to walk the earth to the radical – and sometimes devastating – breakthroughs of the Cognitive, Agricultural and Scientific Revolutions. Drawing on insights from biology, anthropology, palaeontology and economics, he explores how the currents of history have shaped our human societies, the animals and plants around us, and even our personalities. Have we become happier as history has unfolded? Can we ever free our behaviour from the heritage of our ancestors? And what, if anything, can we do to influence the course of the centuries to come?

This event was recorded for broadcast on the BBC World News programme Talking Books.

Is six-party politics here to stay? Is first-past-the-post a bulwark against extremism? What’s the value of a campaign promise in a coalition context? International broadcaster Nik Gowing chairs. Hennessy is Attlee Professor of Contemporary British History at Queen Mary’s; Scurr lectures in Politics at Cambridge; Wood is leader of Plaid Cymru; Boycott is Food Advisor to the Mayor of London.

One of America’s most powerful and feared gangsters is about to face up to his past… On a rare public appearance in Britain, the cult thriller writer of The Wire, author of Gone, Baby, Gone and Mystic River discusses his work and his new novel.

Jacqueline Wilson introduces an exclusive screening of CBBC’s new adaptation of her popular children’s novel Hetty Feather. A fast-paced and thrilling story, featuring a feisty new heroine, Hetty Feather brings the realities of the Victorian age to life through the eyes and adventures of the children who inhabit the Foundling Hospital. The screening will be followed by a Q&A with cast and crew.

Not for broadcast.

Join children’s author Tom Palmer for a quiz about reading sport in newspapers, books and online, followed by a penalty competition, with one team winning the trophy. Tom is the author of 30 sports fiction books for children, including Ghost Stadium and Over the Line. 

LoveReading4Kids and Barrington Stoke are working together to run a series of events dedicated to children with dyslexia. The authors featured in these events are published by award-winning publisher Barrington Stoke, whose books are renowned for their dyslexia-friendly features and layouts, cream paper and special font. These events will be creative, interactive and, most of all, fun.

Throughout the week of the festival LoveReading4Kids and Barrington Stoke expert staff will be on hand in the Make & Take Tent for advice and support for both adults and children. A selection of dyslexia- and reluctant-reader-friendly titles will be available to buy from the Hay Festival Bookshop.