Hay Festival 2022 – Classics

The House of Atreus is cursed. A bloodline tainted by a generational cycle of violence and vengeance. This is the story of three women, their fates inextricably tied to this curse. In a world ruled by gods and men, the voices of strong women have been silenced. Until now. An ancient story of love and sisterhood, Elektra is a spellbinding reimagining of Greek myth with a fresh perspective on the Trojan War. Jennifer Saint’s Ariadne was a Sunday Times top ten bestseller and shortlisted for Waterstones Book of the Year.

The ancient Spartans were a society of citizen-soldiers, famous throughout history for their doomed stand at the Battle of Thermopylae. Andrew Bayliss looks beyond the popular image of muscle-bound soldiers with long hair and red cloaks and explores the mindset of Spartan citizens, in particular their emotions such as anger, fear and shame. He examines the Spartans’ often brutal exploitation of their helot slaves, on whom their warrior lifestyle depended. Senior Lecturer in Greek History at the University of Birmingham, he is author of The Spartans: A Very Short Introduction.

Come and see if Natalie Haynes can squash all 24 books of Homer’s Odyssey down to 28 minutes for her BBC Radio 4 series Natalie Haynes Stands Up for the Classics. She has two chances to practise before she records the show in front of a live audience, and this is the second. Including other new material which she may or may not have written by May.

“Ulysses is going to make my place famous,” Sylvia Beach wrote to James Joyce when she made the decision to publish his novel, written over seven years and describing the events of a single day in Dublin. To celebrate a hundred years of this literary masterpiece, five devoted readers share their thoughts on reading a novel that has a reputation for being challenging, while maintaining a cult-like following as one of the defining books of modernism. ​Xiaolu Guo is a writer, Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company in Paris and John Mitchinson is publisher at Unbound. They talk to writer and journalist Sinéad Gleeson.