Hay Festival 2022 – Special Hay Events

Join Andy Zaltzman for a recording of Radio 4’s flagship topical comedy show as he grabs the week’s headlines and hurls them at four of the nation’s best comedians and journalists including Paul Sinha and Angela Barnes.

Dame Jacqueline Wilson is the highly acclaimed and adored author of so many stories for young people including The Story of Tracy Beaker and Hetty Feather. She is praised for her engaging, warm, funny and insightful take on subjects from adoption to divorce and children in care. She will be in lively conversation with John Wilson about the most formative influences on her writing life for a special edition of BBC Radio 4’s This Cultural Life.

In this spoken-word event PJ Harvey recites poems from her new book and discusses the lyric line with renowned British poet and writer Paul Farley. Orlam reveals Harvey as a gifted poet – whose formal skill and transforming eye and ear have produced a strange and moving poem like no other. Orlam is not only a remarkable coming-of-age tale, but the first full-length book written in the Dorset dialect for many decades.

Join Helena Merriman (Creator of Tunnel 29 and Room 5) for a special recording of BBC Radio 4’s new series all about our minds and bodies – and what happens when they behave in ways we don’t understand.

Helena’s guest is Abi Morgan - the BAFTA and Emmy-award winning playwright and screenwriter whose credits include The Iron Lady, Suffragette, Sex Traffic, The Hour, Brick Lane and Shame. Abi Morgan is also the creator and writer of BBC drama, The Split.

Abi will be talking about her book - This is Not A Pity Memoir. One June morning, Abi came home to find the man she loved lying on the bathroom floor. Rushed to hospital, he was put into a coma and it was clear that life as they knew it would never be the same again.

From ghostly phantoms to UFOs, The Battersea Poltergeist’s Danny Robins investigates real-life stories of paranormal encounters with special guests paranormal experts Ciaran O'Keeffe and Evelyn Hollow.

Over its 100 years, the BBC has pioneered many now-ubiquitous technologies. The BBC’s tech programme, Click, looks at some of the remarkable stories of innovation from the BBC microphone to the famous ‘pips’. In this special show from Hay Festival, host Spencer Kelly brings together a panel of guests to unpack the history of BBC tech before looking to see what the future may hold.

Ian McMillan is always at home in front of a crowd, and in this Hay Festival Verb he is joined by some of our most exciting writers, performers and poets to explore the idea of homeliness – literal or metaphorical – and to ask if writing can be a kind of home.

His guests are: the poet Lemn Sissay, whose latest book for children is a celebration of curiosity and belonging; Monica Ali, who casts her eye across family matters in her new novel Love Marriage; Daniel Morden, a consummate storyteller and performer, acquainted with all the myths of belonging; and Tishani Doshi, whose poetry and prose is alert to the possibilities of a home – in the poem or in the body.

Ian will also share a brand new poetry commission by a contemporary poet for the BBC's centenary – part of The Verb’s Something Old, Something New series.

Radio 3’s Free Thinking/Arts & Ideas podcast explores the seas and oceans. Rana Mitter’s guests are: Nobel Prize-winning author Abdulrazak Gurnah, whose books have drawn on his birthplace Zanzibar and the refugees arriving at the Kent coast; climate scientist Professor Emily Shuckburgh, who worked at the British Antarctic Survey; and Joan Passey, author of Cornish Gothic, a New Generation Thinker on the scheme run by BBC Radio 3 and the Arts and Humanities Research Council to turn research into radio.

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.

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.

Screenshot is Radio 4’s guide through the ever-expanding universe of the moving image. Every episode, Ellen E Jones and Mark Kermode journey through the main streets and back roads connecting film, television and streaming over the last hundred years. In this live show they are joined by special guests Monica Ali, Jennifer Egan, Cressida Cowell and Jeffrey Boakye for an entertaining and sometimes surprising cinematic conversation.

Producer: Jane Long.

You’re Dead To Me, the award-winning, chart-topping BBC podcast that takes history seriously, hosted by Public Historian Greg Jenner, comes to Hay Festival for the first time. Join Greg, academic, writer and broadcaster Dr Corin Throsby and special guest comic Stu Goldsmith as they record a live episode on the History of Fandom. Expect discussions of Byron’s fan mail, the famous theatre stars of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and the historical roots of our modern celebrity and fan culture.

May contain adult language, not suitable for children

Three prize-winning writers – Damon Galgut, Margo Jefferson and Jennifer Egan – discuss family drama, memory and redemption with Helen Lewis. Damon Galgut’s Booker-winning The Promise tells the story of a family and a country, and the failed promises that destroy them both. The promise of a super-connected world with memories as currency is set against the quest for privacy in Jennifer Egan’s The Candy House. And Margo Jefferson examines every passion and influence in her new memoir, Constructing a Nervous System.

Guides from Brecon Beacons National Park lead a gentle walk through the beautiful surrounds of Hay-on-Wye.

Ian McMillan and guests explore language and memory and ask what we choose to write down -or forget. Joining Ian are Jennifer Egan, whose new novel The Candy House imagines wild technological possibilities for human memory; Allie Esiri brings us the words of long forgotten women poets in the anthology A Poet For Every Day of the Year, and Gurnaik Johal examines how we hand down cultural memories in his debut short story collection We Move.

Bestselling poetry anthologist Allie Esiri returns to the Festival to celebrate her latest anthology, A Poet for Every Day of the Year. Allie commences a journey through the calendar year, highlighting key moments and dates with poetry from some of the world’s greatest verse writers, read by leading performers.

A conversation with the team behind the hit BBC podcasts Death by Conspiracy? and War on Truth. Hear how journalists sift fact from fiction – and report on all the bad information swirling around on social media for audiences around the UK and across the globe. Death by Conspiracy? follows the story of Gary Matthews, a man from Shrewsbury who believed in Covid conspiracy theories until he caught the virus and died. Following the remarkable success of that series, Radio 4 launched War on Truth – a reactive series tracking the stories of people caught up in the information war in Ukraine. Both podcasts are presented by the BBC’s first ever specialist disinformation reporter, Marianna Spring, produced by Ant Adeane and edited by Mike Wendling.

BBC Radio Wales’ satirical panel show returns to Hay, as Tom Price and guests Jason Byrne, Konnie Huq and Ian Stone offer erudite analysis, interpretation and laughter as they look at the week's biggest news stories from Wales and the World.

May contain adult language, not suitable for children

What parallels are there between contemporary poetry and spoken word movements and hip hop’s past, present and future? Come chill and find out at the RAP (Rhythm And Poetry) Party, a nostalgic, no-clutter, no-fuss night of hip hop-inspired poems and favourite hip hop songs.

This special Hay Festival edition features event founder Inua Ellams and long-time friend and collaborator Theresa Lola going head-to-head, back-to-back, with DJ Sid Mercutio on the decks.

Born in Nigeria, Inua Ellams is a poet, playwright and performer. Theresa Lola is a British Nigerian poet, writer and editor.