We are pleased to announce the full programme for Hay Festival 2018.
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?
Susan Worrall is Director of Special Collections, 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.
Major General Arthur Denaro commemorates the centenary of the death of Herefordshire’s only Great War recipient of the Victoria Cross, cited for exemplary leadership and ‘a splendid disregard of danger’ in single-handedly disabling enemy machine gun placements that had been enfilading his entire battalion at Ronssey during the Battle of Épehy.
Helen Moore is an eco-poet based in north-east Scotland. She has published two poetry collections, Hedge Fund, and Other Living Margins and ECOZOA. A third collection, The Mother Country, is due in 2019. Chaired by Jane Davidson, director of the award-winning INSPIRE at University of Wales, Trinity Saint David.
The Road to Palmyra follows historian Dan Cruickshank and legendary photographer Don McCullin into the heart of war-torn Syria, on a dangerous mission to document the cultural destruction wrought by Isis, and to understand what it means to the people of the nation. Their final destination is the ancient city of Palmyra to find out what remains of the ruins after Isis fled. These stones represent the very soul of Syria, and the debate about what to do with them is about to begin. For both men, it is a return journey to a place with which they have long been obsessed, but to get there, they have to travel through a country still in the grip of war. Cruickshank, McCullin and director Adrian Sibley discuss the challenges of filming in a war zone. Followed by Q&A
The Irish Referendum on abortion will take place on 25 May 2018. Since 1983 an estimated 170,000 Irish women have travelled to the UK to terminate their pregnancies, incurring high costs, logistical difficulties and emotional strain. Another 2,000 women a year end pregnancies by taking the abortion pill, illegally obtained online. Whatever the result of the referendum, the impact on Ireland’s society will be huge. Professor de Londras’ research concerns constitutionalism, human rights and transnationalism. Máiréad Enright researches in feminist legal studies and religion.
A world leading expert in her field, Professor Davies has visited countries all around the world to see how they are responding to the serious effects of climate change. A recipient of the Philip Leverhulme Prize and most recently a Fulbright Scholarship, Professor Davies presented the popular groundbreaking documentary series Her yr Hinsawdd (Climate Challenge). With the programme’s producer, Elin Rhys, she will discuss the importance and the challenges of engaging the public with scientific research.
The first part of an evening of delicious cricket talk celebrates the career of the legendary broadcaster and commentator. Now that 'Blowers' has decided to declare his TMS innings closed, his book reveals the secrets of life in the commentary box and of the rich cast of characters with whom he shared it, from the early days of John Arlott and Brian Johnson to Aggers and new boys Boycott, Swann, Vaughan and Tuffers.
A Book Club like no other, as our favourite literary vaudevillians read about monsters and Europe and things that go bump in the mind. Crace writes the satirical Digested Reads for the Guardian. Sutherland is Emeritus Lord Northcliffe Professor of English at UCL and the go-to senior Eng-Lit Super-Don.
