Hay Festival 2016

An opportunity to get crafting! Activities differ every day, including everything from print-making to junk modelling with recycled materials. Get messy and creative: your imagination is the limit.

Book for the session and you can drop in at any point during the 2.5 hour duration. An accompanying adult must attend at all times but does not require a ticket.

Mazzucato calls for new levels of boldness and experimentation to be applied to the biggest social and political issues of our time: inequality, disease and climate change. She argues we need to rethink the capacities and role of government within the economy and society, launching new ‘missions’ that require and incentivise innovation in all sectors to achieve a common goal.

Her ‘mission-oriented’ approach means fundamentally changing the relationship between public and private, making them more genuinely purpose-driven. With its ideas already being adopted around the world – including by the European Commission and Scottish government – Mission Economy offers a way out of our impasse to a more inclusive and sustainable future. She talks to Financial Times journalist Gillian Tett.

It’s 2010. Staggeringly successful and brilliant tech entrepreneur Bix Bouton is desperate for a new idea. He’s forty, with four kids, and restless when he stumbles into a conversation with mostly Columbia professors, one of whom is experimenting with downloading or ‘externalising’ memory. Within a decade, Bix’s new technology, Own Your Unconscious – that allows you access to every memory you’ve ever had, and to share every memory in exchange for access to the memories of others – has seduced multitudes. But not everyone.

Egan spins out the consequences of Own Your Unconscious through the lives of multiple characters whose paths intersect over several decades. Intellectually dazzling and extraordinarily moving, The Candy House is a bold imagining of a world that is moments away. Egan explores the darker aspects of our technology-driven, image-saturated culture and the tenacity and transcendence of human longing for real connection, love, family, privacy and redemption.

Fi Glover and Jane Garvey bring the hit Radio 4 podcast Fortunately… with Fi and Jane back to Hay for a live show. Expect more award-winning, chart-topping, patriarchy-busting ‘inane drivel’, as it’s lovingly called by listeners. Fi and Jane are two of the best broadcasters around and they’re ready with wise insights on life, womanhood, parenting, favourite hobs, drain unclogging and more. Join them as they create a place of audio safety right here in the Marquee.

Join the audience for a recording of Sky Arts Big Weekend, a 90-minute TV programme, featuring interviews and conversations with some of the biggest and best names at the Festival. The programmes will air across the weekend of 10–12 June on Sky Arts (Freeview Channel 11), Sky Arts HD and Now. Studio guests include Michael Morpurgo, Melvyn Bragg, Jen Cownie & Fiona Lensvelt, Yvette Fielding, Paul Farley and Tishani Doshi.

A new collaboration with Shakespeare’s Globe brings nine performances of Julius Caesar to a specially commissioned open-air theatre at the newly renovated Hay Castle. The travelling company of actors, will bring to life Shakespeare’s political thriller with a stripped back production made fresh for our world today.

Touring has been a longstanding tradition at Shakespeare’s Globe in London, since the tours of the Elizabethan Lord Chamberlain’s Men. Shakespeare’s versatile troupe toured frequently in the summer especially when there was a plague or political unrest. Shakespeare’s Globe has now established a world renowned reputation for highly ambitious and economical Shakespearean storytelling in the rough and ready fashion of Elizabethan times.

“We are so delighted to be able to finally come to the Hay Festival to perform against the breath-taking backdrop of Hay Castle.” – Shakespeare’s Globe

Click here to pre-book a delicious picnic box to enjoy during the performance.

You’re invited to Alem’s birthday party, but where will he be celebrating? Maybe the bear, the fox, the treefrog or the bulldog know? But don’t ask the dragon… or he will EAT you! Join Lemn Sissay and Greg Stobbs for a fun, interactive reading with colouring activities from their new picture book – a heart-warming story about finding joy and home wherever you are.

What every young person needs to know. Join this interactive workshop with bestselling author and financial empowerment guide Linda Davies, where you’ll learn how to create a healthy relationship with money.

Yasmin Ghorami has a lot to be grateful for: a loving family, a fledgling career in medicine, and a charming, handsome fiancée, fellow doctor Joe Sangster. But as the wedding day draws closer and Yasmin’s parents get to know Joe’s firebrand feminist mother, both families must confront the unravelling of long-held secrets, lies and betrayals. As Yasmin dismantles her own assumptions about the people she holds most dear, she’s also forced to ask herself what she really wants in a relationship and what a ‘love marriage’ actually means.

Love Marriage is a story about who we are and how we love in today’s Britain – with all the complications and contradictions of life, desire, marriage and family. What starts as a captivating social comedy develops into a heartbreaking, gripping story of two cultures, two families and two people trying to understand one another.

Between 1917 and 1921 a devastating struggle took place in Russia following the collapse of the Tsarist empire. Many regard this savage civil war as the most influential event of the modern era. An incompatible White alliance of moderate socialists and reactionary monarchists stood little chance against Trotsky’s Red Army and Lenin’s Communist dictatorship. The struggle became a world war by proxy as Churchill deployed weaponry and troops from the British empire, while armed forces from the United States, France, Italy, Japan, Poland and Czechoslovakia played rival parts.

The author of Stalingrad gives an action-packed account of the Russian Revolution, filled with historical detail from the streets of Petrograd, the brutal battlefield and the offices of Churchill, Lenin and Trotsky. He assembles the complete picture, conveying the conflict through the eyes of everyone from the worker on the streets of Petrograd to the cavalry officer on the battlefield and the woman doctor in an improvised hospital.

Louise O’Neill’s Idol interrogates our relationship with the world of online influencers, asking how well we can ever really know those whose carefully curated profiles we follow online. Emma Gannon’s (Dis)Connected is a toolkit for people overwhelmed by digital overload, offering help to avoid being engulfed by algorithms.

Louise O’Neill writes for YA and adult readers and is author of Only Ever Yours, Asking For It, Almost Love, The Surface Breaks and After the Silence (Crime Novel of the Year at the Irish Book Awards). Emma Gannon is author of Ctrl Alt Delete: How I Grew Up Online and The Multi-Hyphen Method.

Winner of MasterChef in 2005, Thomasina Miers has led the love for Mexican cuisine in the UK with her award-winning street food restaurants Wahaca and a stream of bestselling cookbooks. In her new book Meat-free Mexican, she shows that real Mexican food, as one of the world’s most diverse cuisines, is perfect for anyone looking for inspiration in their vegetarian and vegan cooking.

Thomasina’s central philosophy is that three times a day we have a chance to influence climate change by how we buy food and what we eat. Wahaca was the first restaurant group in the UK to be certified carbon neutral, and she was awarded an OBE for her services to the food industry in 2019.

Over 320,000 people worldwide drown every year. As long as people and vessels are on the water, search and rescue (SAR) operations are needed. Yet operating conditions are increasingly challenging and SAR teams face unprecedented new risks.

Searchlight is the third short film commissioned by Lloyd’s Register Foundation to explore the relationship between the ocean and people all around the world – people who rely on the ocean for food or their livelihood, live in coastal communities, or those who work at sea. Given the increasing demands we are placing on ocean space and the risk of working in ever more extreme environments, how can we better protect people from harm?

The première is followed by a discussion between Ruth Boumphrey, Director of Research and Strategic Programmes for Lloyd’s Register Foundation, Dan McDougall, film director, writer and British Foreign Correspondent of the Year – who has won four Amnesty International Awards for Human Rights Reporting – and Jamie Chestnutt, Director of Engineering & Supply at the RNLI. In conversation with Andy Fryers, Sustainability Director at Hay Festival.

Come and join Cerys Matthews and Jeffrey Boakye as they continue their musical journey of discovery in Hay, with special guests. Explore the surprising delights of where it takes us as they create a playlist with each track chosen for its musical connections with the previous one. From Jacques Brel to Beyoncé, or Rimsky-Korsakov to Britney Spears. Discover obscure compositions you may never have heard, or learn more about those pop bangers you just can’t get out of your head. Their guests include tenor Wynne Evans and the electronic producer and performer Rachel K Collier.

Tom Service brings his hugely popular Radio 3 programme The Listening Service to Hay Festival 2022. Each week Tom creates a fantastic aural spectacle as he takes his ideas on an ear-opening and mind-expanding walk through the musical cosmos. The fun lies in Tom’s fearless interplay with the music. He creates connections across music genres to reveal a world where Miley Cyrus and Mozart, Herbie Hancock and Franz Schubert often collide. Today the subject is the Cadenza. Tom is joined at the piano by the brilliant pianist, thinker and writer Jeremy Denk as they put that technically brilliant musical flourish through its paces.

A one-hour collaging workshop with Hay Festival Illustrator in Residence Tom Etherington and Bethan Thomas, founder of Collage Crew workshops. Tom and Bethan guide you through the playful world of collage. Create striking artwork from old books, while learning about what makes an iconic book cover. Tom is a former Penguin Books designer behind some of the most memorable jacket images of recent times, from Greta Thunberg’s No One is Too Small to Make a Difference and Grayson Perry’s The Descent of Man to the recent Jack Kerouac reissues and the Green Ideas series.

Visit Hay Castle’s inaugural exhibition, Portraits of Writers, where Tom True, director of Hay Castle, will give a ten-minute introduction to the exhibition followed by a question and answer session in the gallery.

Portraits of Writers is the exciting inaugural exhibition at Hay Castle, newly opened to the public after a major restoration project. The display, selected from the collection of the National Portrait Gallery by guest curator, author and journalist Dylan Jones OBE, brings together a range of portraits of celebrated British individuals who identify as writers. The golden thread is the theme of identity, both individual and collective. The exhibition presents a range of methods and approaches used by artists to capture the complex identities of writers, including gender identity, sexuality, race, ethnicity, national and regional identity, migration and colonisation. Writers depicted include RIz Ahmed, Simon Armitage, Salman Rushdie and Bernardine Evaristo.

BBC Radio 4’s Fi Glover and Jane Garvey don’t claim to have all the answers (what was the question?), but they take modern life by its elasticated waist and give it a brisk going-over with a stiff brush. They riff together on the chuff of life, from pet deaths to the importance of hair dye, the perils and pleasures of judging other women, and the perplexing over-confidence of chino-wearing, middle-aged white men named Roger.

They go over some essential life skills (never buy an acrylic jumper, always decline the offer of a limoncello), pondering orgasm merchandise and suggesting the possibility that Christmas is an hereditary disease, passed down the maternal line.

Our panel of experts debate the role of governments within the economy and society, the digital challenges facing society and how to recover a sense of public purpose. Mariana Mazzucato is Professor in the Economics of Innovation and Public Value at University College London where she is Founding Director of the Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose. Jamie Susskind is a barrister and author of the award-winning Future Politics: Living Together in a World Transformed by Tech. His new book, The Digital Republic: On Freedom and Democracy in the 21st Century, will be released in June. Financial Times journalist Gillian Tett is author of Anthro-Vision: How Anthropology Can Explain Business and Life. They talk to entrepreneur and publisher William Sieghart.