Hay Festival 2019 Programme

“Every minute was magical, every single thing it did was fascinating and everything it didn’t do was equally wondrous, and to be sat there, with a kestrel, a real live kestrel, my own real live kestrel on my wrist! I felt like I’d climbed through a hole in heaven's fence.” The naturalist and presenter of Springwatch and Secrets of our Living Planet introduces his exquisite coming-of-age memoir. He talks to the author of Truant: Notes From the Slippery Slope.

Armitage’s acclaimed version of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight confirmed his reputation as a leading poetry translator. This new work is an entrancing allegorical tale of grief and lost love. The narrator is led on a Dantean journey through sorrow to redemption by his vanished beloved, Pearl. Retaining all the alliterative music of the original, a Medieval English poem thought to be by the same anonymous author responsible for Gawain, Pearl is here brought to vivid and intricate life.

It is 30 March 1924. Beginning with an intimate assignation and opening to embrace decades, Mothering Sunday has at its heart both the story of a life, and the life that stories can magically contain. Constantly surprising, joyously sensual and deeply moving, this novella is a masterpiece from the Booker winner. He talks to Peter Florence.

1 November 2006, Alexander Litvinenko is brazenly poisoned in central London. Twenty-two days later he dies, killed from the inside. The poison? Polonium; a rare, lethal and highly radioactive substance. His crime? He had made some powerful enemies in Russia. Harding, foreign correspondent of the Guardian, argues that Litvinenko’s assassination marked the beginning of the deterioration of Moscow’s relations with the west and a decade of geo-political disruptions: from the war in Ukraine, a civilian plane shot down, at least 7,000 dead, two million people displaced and a Russian president’s defiant rejection of a law-based international order. Chaired by Oliver Bullough.

An evening of live and acoustic performances from Matthew Frederick, The Minerals, Tendons and Climbing Trees (photo).

Under 16s must be accompanied by an adult over 18 years

in association with BBC Wales and The Arts Council of Wales

www.bbc.co.uk/horizons

Immunotherapy is now the hottest topic in cancer research and could revolutionise the way the disease is treated in the future. Our internationally renowned panel discuss the vast potential of the immune system. Quezada is Professor of Immune Regulation and Tumour Immunotherapy at UCL. Kristeleit is Clinical Senior Lecturer and Consultant Medical Oncologist at UCLH. Elliott is Professor of Experimental Medicine at the University of Southampton. In conversation with Sarah Knapton.

Lyrical, haunting and exquisitely rendered, Samson’s second novel The Kindness explores a deception that comes wrapped as a gift, a betrayal clothed in kindness, and asks if we can ever truly trust another. She’s written an unforgettable story of love, grief, betrayal and reconciliation, masterfully plotted and beautifully told. In Norris’ debut Five Rivers Met on a Wooded Plain, the peace of a quiet evening in Salisbury is shattered by a serious car crash. At that moment, five lives collide – a flower seller, a schoolboy, an army wife, a security guard, a widower – drawn together by connection and coincidence into a web of love, grief, disenchantment and hope that perfectly represents the joys and tragedies of small-town life.

The human rights activist presents the arguments pertaining to the 1998 Act of Parliament that hooked our legal system to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg.

Did you know that two-thirds of people turn their head to the right when kissing? Or that some animals eat their own babies? Is it possible that you make better decisions when you need a wee? That a pig’s orgasm can last up to 30 minutes? Or that the ridge at the end of the human penis may actually have a function? The charismatic scientist’s fascinating and funny cabaret show is not suitable for children, or the easily batfoggled.

Part guide to the best practice in every aspect of working with this renewable energy source, part meditation on the human instinct for survival, Mytting’s definitive handbook on the art of chopping, stacking and drying wood in the Scandinavian way has resonated across the world.

The director and writer of this documentary introduce a special screening of the film in which Sands, a human rights lawyer, conducts conversations with two men, Niklas Frank and Horst von Wächter, whose fathers were indicted as war criminals for their roles in the Second World War. Ends at 10.30pm.

Our lungs are exposed to airborne particles in all aspects of everyday life, and global research suggests that they can cause serious health problems, especially in people with pre-existing lung and heart disease. Kelly Bérubé, Reader in Biosciences at The Lung and Particle Research Group, shares the latest findings.

Marcus Brigstocke was born with a long face and now there’s UKIP and Putin and being single and Islamic State and George Osborne and Paul Dacre of the Daily bastard Mail and tax dodging corporations and the bloody referendum and did he mention being single? Join the comedian for an evening of laughter and lamenting.

The wives of the great, the good and the not so good set the history books straight with wry wit and some subversive secrets as they tell you their side of their husbands’ stories.  Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy’s collection is abridged for the stage by the award-winning National Youth Theatre of Great Britain, and directed by Alice Knight.

2016 sees the world’s first youth theatre celebrate its 60th anniversary. Celebrations will include eye-catching commissions, age-defying fundraising events and an attempt to audition more young people aged 14-25 from around the UK than ever before. To find out more about how you can get involved go to www.nyt.org.uk

The elegantly gifted RCM guitarist from the Golden Valley plays the first of two meditative late-night concerts. His programme includes: JS Bach - Prelude, Girolamo Frescobaldi - Aria con Variazioni, S.L Weiss - Passacaglia, Walton - Bagatelle II, Scarlatti - Sonatas kp 322 and kp 208, Napoleon Coste - Introduction and Allegretto.

An interview with the novelist, winner of the 2015 Man Booker Prize.

“It’s like a Tarantino remake of The Harder They Come but with a soundtrack by Bob Marley and a script by Oliver Stone and William Faulkner, with maybe a little creative boost from some primo ganja. It’s epic in every sense of that word: sweeping, mythic, over-the-top, colossal and dizzyingly complex. It’s also raw, dense, violent, scalding, darkly comic, exhilarating and exhausting – a testament to Mr. James’ vaulting ambition and prodigious talent.” New York Times

Unshackled now from her role as the BBC’s Diplomatic Correspondent, the doyenne of international journalism talks about her thirty years as a foreign correspondent. She covered the fall of the Soviet Union from Moscow and the heydays and dogdays of the Clinton administration from Washington. A fluent Russian speaker, she has become the authority on the rise and rule of Vladimir Putin and the re-emergence of Russia as a superpower. She will be Master of Peterhouse, Cambridge from July.

The former BP CEO of BP articulates and explores the recurring rift between big business and society, offering a practical manifesto for reconciliation. It’s a call to arms for real and effective corporate social responsibility.  Chaired by Rosie Boycott.

The first authoritative history of the Submarine Service, the most secretive and mysterious of Britain’s armed forces, from the end of the Second World War to the present. As we come to decide whether to renew the nuclear deterrent, Hennessy and Jinks analyse the development of Britain’s submarine fleet, its capabilities, its weapons, its infrastructure, its operations and, above all – from the testimony of many submariners and the first-hand witness of the authors – what life is like on board for the denizens of the silent deep.

The novelist discusses her new book set in C19^th America. In this rich, powerful story, Chevalier is at her imaginative best, bringing to life the urge to wrestle with our roots, however deep and tangled they may be.