Hay Festival 2019 Programme

An exciting workshop with plenty of hands-on activities and exciting coding challenges for parents and children who will work together and code Sphero SPRK+ robot to dance to their favourite song. Children will then code their Spheros to race, with amazing prizes for winners.

It's the most simple, unassuming, innocent-looking verb: 'to be'. Yet it is jam-packed with more different meanings, forms and uses than any other English word. As he reveals ‘be's’ multiple incarnations, Prof Crystal takes us to the heart of our flexible and changing language. We meet circumstantial be ("how are you?"), numerical be ("two and two is four"), quotative be ("so I was like, 'wow'"), and ludic be ("oh no he isn't!"), and a whole swarm of other meanings.

Growing up on the Cambridgeshire Fens, Will Millard never felt more at home than when he was out with his granddad on the riverbank, whiling away the day catching fish. As he grew older, his competitive urge to catch more and bigger fish led him away from that natural connection between him, his grandfather and the rivers of his home. That is, until the fateful day he let a record-breaking sand eel slip through his fingers and he knew that he had lost the magic of those days down by the river, and that something had to change. The Old Man and the Sand Eel is at its heart the story of three generations of men trying to figure out what it is to be a man, a father and a fisherman.

Why did landscape become a subject for art in the 18th century and not before? Where might we look for clues to an earlier ‘sense of place’? The Professor of English, author of Weatherland and Romantic Moderns, examines the history of English landscape painting and local writing from the particular perspective of going back to her childhood home in Sussex. She talks with Tim Dee, editor of a timely collection of the best British nature writing newly commissioned by one of the great authorities on the subject - Ground Work. The book explores a sense of place, and our obligations of custodianship in this land.

A hundred years ago, a girl was born in the northern Ethiopian city of Gondar. Before she was ten years old, Yetemegnu was married to a man two decades her senior, an ambitious poet-priest. Over the next century her world changed beyond recognition. She witnessed fascist invasion and occupation, Allied bombardment and exile from her city, the ascent and fall of Emperor Haile Selassie, revolution and civil war. She endured all these things alongside parenthood, widowhood and the death of children. The Wife’s Tale is an intimate memoir, both of a life and of a country. Edemariam retells her grandmother’s stories in a masterpiece that is being compared to Jung Chang’s Wild Swans.

Alison Hindell, Head of Audio Drama for the BBC, and Jessica Dromgoole, Editor of Radio 4’s Home Front, together with key members of the writing team, discuss the epic World War One radio drama series. Bringing home the realities of daily life in Britain during the course of the war, the series will conclude in November 2018 at the centenary of the Armistice.

A boy discovers a microscopic fantasy civilisation living on a bedroom floor. What would it be like to be an ant-sized person living in your own house? In this event, you'll re-imagine everyday places and objects – toasters, toilets, hamsters – from the point of view of a pint-sized explorer.

Who will win the 2018 YA Book Prize? Join the pre-award presentation to hear from authors on the shortlist, which this year includes Emily Barr, M.A. Bennett, Holly Bourne, Sarah Crossan, Will Hill, Patrice Lawrence, Patrick Ness, Sally Nicholls, Philip Pullman, Alex Wheatle, before the announcement of the winner. The event will also celebrate Stripes Publishing and the authors of its YA anthology A Change Is Gonna Come, winner of the YA Book Prize Special Achievement Award.

From the Discover Children’s Story Centre comes an imaginative storytelling event based around Maggie Tokuda-Hall and Benji Davies’ book. The audience will be guided through a specially commissioned performance of this picture-book, before being challenged them to help create a brand new story all together, all from nothing. This event will take children on an adventure across Space and time.

A conversation with the great storyteller and comic novelist, author of Rivals, Riders, and most recently, Mount!

Trees are one of humanity’s most constant and most varied companions. From India’s sacred banyan tree to the fragrant cedar of Lebanon, they offer us sanctuary and inspiration – not to mention the raw materials for everything from aspirin to maple syrup. Jonathan Drori, a trustee of The Woodland Trust and The Eden Project, uses plant science to illuminate how trees play a role in every part of human life, from the romantic to the regrettable.

The islands of the Pacific and Indian oceans and the people who inhabited these seas are some of the most marginalised places and people in Western historical memory. Yet they played a crucial role in modern political, intellectual and cultural thought, and may be sites to watch for the future of humanity even as environmental change takes its course. Dr Sivasundaram is Reader in World History.

Radiocarbon dating recently identified a manuscript in the University of Birmingham’s Cadbury Research Library as possibly the world's oldest fragment of the Qur’an, showing it to be at least 1,370 years old and attracting unprecedented international interest. Similarly, the earliest Latin commentary on the Gospels was rediscovered in a manuscript in Cologne Cathedral Library after being lost for 1,500 years and published for the first time last year with an English translation. How are such texts identified, authenticated and catalogued? What measures are taken to preserve them and make them available for scholarly research and public interest? What are the cutting edge technologies being used to analyse, protect and recover key historical documents?
Sarah Kilroy is Head of Conservation and Programming and Hugh Houghton is Director of Research at the Department of Theology and Religion and leads Birmingham's Institute for Textual Scholarship and Electronic Editing.

Manchester-based poetry collective Young Identity presents a live set from some of the rising stars of the UK spoken word scene, with performances by Isaiah Hull, Damani Dennisur, Liv Barnes, Billie Meredith and Roma Havers. This diverse group of artists are aged 16-25 and represent some of the most articulate young voices the country has to offer.

A Contains Strong Language event – BBC’s Festival of Poetry and Performance

The British government’s own analysis of the economic impact of Brexit forecasts a fall in gross domestic product of 9% for Wales. The role of non-resident Welsh people (the Welsh Diaspora) and their soft power, in bringing new wealth and prosperity to Wales, is of huge importance and could be transformational. With global engagement changing the fortunes of nations and exerting huge influence over many aspects of public life and economic development, it’s time Wales got serious about diaspora. Mark Neale, CEO and founder of Mountain Warehouse, Kingsley Atkins, the founder and CEO of Ireland’s Diaspora Matters, and Rachel Minto, an EU expert based at Cardiff University, talk to Guto Harri.

Celebrate the launch of Skulduggery Pleasant 11: Midnight. Revisit all your favourite characters including Skulduggery, Valkyrie and Omen. Put your questions to The Golden God himself and hear how he became an author and got the inspiration for the series.

An exciting workshop with plenty of hands-on activities and exciting coding challenges for parents and children who will work together and code Sphero SPRK+ robot to dance to their favourite song. Children will then code their Spheros to race, with amazing prizes for winners.

The broadcaster and historian teams up with his wife, Canadian journalist Ann MacMillan, to present the book they wrote together about 34 people who had extraordinary experiences in wartime. They have found tales of stunning individual bravery and resilience in the face of extreme distress over the course of 150 years – from the Charge of the Light Brigade to the Syrian government’s shelling of Homs. They will give a fully illustrated PowerPoint presentation highlighting some of their most gripping stories and talk about how they came to write them.

The acclaimed science writer uses chicken as the lens for examining everything that has gone wrong in the modern agricultural system: overuse of antibiotics, threats to the environment, violations of animal welfare, destruction of farm economies and rural civic structure, disruption of international trade and delivery of over-processed, obesity-promoting, nutritionally hollow food. McKenna takes us from vast poultry farms to laboratories, kitchens and street-food markets around the world, revealing how economic, political and cultural forces converged to make our favourite meat a hidden danger. Boycott is chair of the London Food Board.