Hay Festival 2023

Do you ever wonder where the stuff around you all came from? No, not from the shops. I mean, who had the amazing idea of making video games or the annoying idea of building a school? In this laugh-out-loud event with the record-breaking and extremely handsome Adam Kay and Henry Paker, you’ll learn about everything ever invented, from the daft to the disgusting to the downright dangerous. You’ll discover the queen who pooed on the first ever toilet, how velcro was invented by a dog and why the Ancient Greeks wiped their bums on dinner plates, as well as 48,762,851,208 other facts. (Approximately.)

Worldbuilding is the key to captivating stories in films, television and gaming as well as books. You’ll have fun working together in this interactive session to help you create your own unique world. Gita Ralleigh is the author of The Destiny of Minou Moonshine and The Voyage of Sam Singh, both magical adventures set in a parallel colonial India.

Do you ever get stuck for a story idea, or when you’ve started writing quickly run out of steam? Author Emma Carroll (The Somerset Tsunami, The Week at World’s End) shares tips on how to fire your imagination in this fun, interactive workshop, searching out potential ideas and inspirations to encourage you to keep writing. You’ll consider how the unique experience of being you can be useful when writing, as well as trying out some short exercises to warm up your creativity so you’re ready to put pen to paper.

An opportunity to get crafting! Activities differ every day, including everything from print-making to junk modelling with recycled materials. Get messy and creative: your imagination is the limit.

Book for the session and you can drop in at any point during the 1.5 hour duration. Accompanying adults: please stay in attendance at all times, but you do not require a ticket.

Come to the Family Garden for a pizza masterclass with Kitchen Garden Pizza. In this one-hour session your imagination and creativity will be fed along with your belly! You’ll get your hands messy with freshly grown and foraged ingredients, make and top your own dough and observe the pizzaioli at work at the wood-fired oven. And while you wait for your pizza to cook, you can decorate your own pizza box!
Dairy-free and gluten-free options available.

Enjoy a half-hour open air performance between events. A crew of local landlubbers singing rollicking, traditional sea shanties in a cappella three-part harmony, as well as other songs on a nautical theme. Enjoyment is guaranteed or else you’ll walk the plank!

Hay Shantymen have been together for over seven years, raising more than £10,000 for the RNLI. They’ve performed widely, including Latitude and Falmouth International Shanty Festival. In 2023 they wrote a shanty of their own (‘Seaweed Revolution’), performed at the Natural History Museum in London. Their album Songs from the Shed is available at hayshantymen.com.

The most talked about British story of the year so far has been the Post Office scandal, thanks to a television drama. ITV’s Mr Bates vs The Post Office, starring Toby Jones as the titular Mr Bates, dramatised the case of hundreds of subpostmasters across the UK who were wrongly prosecuted after faulty computer software found money missing from post office branches.

Join Toby Jones to discuss both his role in this series, and his extensive TV and film career as one of the UK's most regarded stage and screen actors, and to discuss the power in television and film to shed light on human stories.

The Nobel Prize-winning biologist and former president of the Royal Society explores the science of why and how we age and die. The knowledge of death is so terrifying that we live most of our lives in denial of it, and our fear has underpinned our religions, inspired our cultures, and driven our science. Today giant strides are being made in our understanding of death, and immortality might even be within our grasp. But what are the social and ethical costs of attempting to live forever? He talks to the Radio 4 broadcaster and president of the British Humanist Association.

Sarah Marsh discusses her accomplished debut, inspired by her experiences of growing up deaf and her family’s history of deafness. Receiving an unexpected visit from Alexander Graham Bell, Ellen Lark knows at once what he wants from her. Ellen is deaf, and for a time was Bell’s student, when he confided in her his dream of producing a device to transmit the human voice along a wire: the telephone. Now, Bell wants Ellen to speak up in support of his claim to the patent, which is being challenged by rivals. But she has a different story to tell: that of how Bell betrayed her, and other deaf pupils, in pursuit of ambition and personal gain. Marsh talks to historian Professor Suzannah Lipscomb.

Join us for a recording of The Verb, BBC Radio 4’s poetry celebration and ‘language lock-in’, hosted by its kindly pub-landlord Ian McMillan. In our special festival editions Ian has invited a host of award-winning poets, writers and performers to join him on stage for a spoken word party. His guests include poets Simon Armitage, Owen Sheers, Hanan Issa and Joseph Coelho.

Dermot O’Leary, the popular presenter and author of the Toto the Ninja Cat series, swoops into Hay Festival to tell us all about his brand new action-adventure story with a feathery twist. Wings of Glory is a wartime tale guaranteed to make you laugh and cry – featuring courageous loop-the-loops, top secret plans and more than a smattering of bird poo!

Unlock the mystic art of curse writing in this hands-on ‘invocations’ workshop, where you’ll craft personalised spells with Krystal Sutherland, inspired by the witchy world of The Invocations. Join the bestselling author for an enchanting session of creativity and magic, and leave with your own bespoke curse. No humans are harmed in the making of this curse!

Please bring your own notebook and pen or pencil to this event.

Do you ever get stuck for a story idea, or when you’ve started writing quickly run out of steam? Author Emma Carroll (The Somerset Tsunami, The Week at World’s End) shares tips on how to fire your imagination in this fun, interactive workshop, searching out potential ideas and inspirations to encourage you to keep writing. You’ll consider how the unique experience of being you can be useful when writing, as well as trying out some short exercises to warm up your creativity so you’re ready to put pen to paper.

Come to the Family Garden for a pizza masterclass with Kitchen Garden Pizza. In this one-hour session your imagination and creativity will be fed along with your belly! You’ll get your hands messy with freshly grown and foraged ingredients, make and top your own dough and observe the pizzaioli at work at the wood-fired oven. And while you wait for your pizza to cook, you can decorate your own pizza box!
Dairy-free and gluten-free options available.

The botanist draws on her expertise and experience as an indigenous woman to show how other living beings offer us gifts and lessons, even if we’ve forgotten how to hear their voices. Her subjects range from the Native American legend of the Skywoman to the language of wild strawberries and squash, asters and goldenrod, algae and sweetgrass. Her collection of essays weaves together traditional ecological knowledge and scientific knowledge to examine the relationship people have, and can have, with the living environment. Kimmerer lives in New York where she is founder and director of the Centre for Native Peoples and the Environment. She talks about her book Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants with farmer and author James Rebanks.

Join Professor Susanna Lipscomb, chair of judges for the inaugural Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction, in conversation with Laura Cumming (Thunderclap) and Noreen Masud (A Flat Place), two of the writers shortlisted for the 2024 prize. They discuss their selected books, their broader themes and the importance of this new prize as a platform to elevate women’s voices in non-fiction that have previously been overlooked.

The winner of the 2024 Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction will be announced on Thursday 13 June. Brought to you by the Women’s Prize Trust, the charity which enriches society by creating equitable opportunities for women in the world of books and beyond.

Three authors who share a personal history of displacement and violence discuss writing about their birth countries with lawyer and writer Philippe Sands. Pulitzer Prize winner Hisham Matar is an American-Libyan writer whose novel, My Friends, is about three friends in political exile and the emotional homeland that deep friendships can provide. Elif Shafak is a Turkish-British novelist, author of The Island of Missing Trees, shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2022, which follows a romantic relationship between a Greek and a Turkish Cypriot. Palestinian writer Adania Shibli is the author of PEN Translates Award-winning and International Booker Prize-longlisted Minor Detail, a meditation on war, violence and memory that dissects the Palestinian experience of dispossession and life under occupation.

Journey back in time 700 years with Honey & Co chefs Sarit Packer and Itamar Srulovich, as they explore connections between the food of medieval Moorish Spain and the recipes they have championed and popularised as two of the UK’s best-loved chefs. They draw on medieval recipes as revealed in the 13th century Andalusian manuscript Best of Delectable Foods and Dishes from al-Andalus and al-Maghrib: A Cookbook by Thirteenth-Century Andalusi Scholar Ibn Razīn al-Tujībī (1227–1293). Watch the couple demonstrate a recipe from the book, and try some delicious tastings.

Honey & Co’s cookbooks include Chasing Smoke: Cooking Over Fire around the Levant and Food from the Middle East. Packer and Srulovich talk to Polly Russell, a food historian and curator at the British Library.

Travel between the Rocky Mountains and Trinidad with authors Kevin Barry and Ingrid Persaud, who discuss their new novels with critic Alex Clark. Barry’s The Heart in Winter is about Tom Rourke, a young poet and a degenerate in Montana in the late 1800s. When Polly Gillespie arrives as the new bride of the devout mine captain, Tom falls in love with her and they ride into the sunset, but a posse of deranged Cornish gunsmen is soon in hot pursuit. Persaud's The Lost Love Songs of Boysie Singh is the tale of four women, connected and controlled by one man: the notorious, charismatic gangster Boysie Singh.

The world’s human population acquires two thirds of its calories from just three crops, each with one harvest in each hemisphere. With a burgeoning population, cities spreading onto productive agricultural land and climate change, the area we have for producing food is steadily declining. So where will we grow our food and what will it look like? Will we go vegan or produce all our food organically?

Agronomist Jonathon Harrington (Cardiff University) leads a discussion with three world authorities, Professor Tina Barsby (University of Cambridge), Professor Denis Murphy (University of South Wales), and International Agricultural Economist Graham Brookes, on this essential subject. Join the experts to hear the scale of the issues and then come together to workshop some solutions.

Ivor Novello Award nominated songwriter and international reggae artist shares his insights into writing global hits including Boom Shak-A-Lak and Arranged Marriage.

Author Annabelle Hirsch delves into her collection of 101 objects that make up the neglected history of women, in conversation with Countryfile presenter Anita Rani. This quiet, intimate and particular history takes in everything from humble household items to objects of female pleasure and of female subjugation. Readings from Julia Gillard, Helena Kennedy, Miriam Margolyes and Aditi Mittal bring to life these fascinating, too-often-overlooked, manifold histories of women.

Hirsch is a writer and translator; Gillard is former prime minister of Australia; Kennedy is a barrister and a Labour member of the House of Lords; Margolyes is an actor of stage and screen; and Mittal is a comedian and actor.

What can the history of slave revolts teach us about the power of rebellion to tackle the climate crisis? How might understanding the origins of capitalism spark ideas for bringing AI under control? What could we learn from the coffee houses of Georgian London to tame social media? Social philosopher Roman Krznaric looks at 1,000 years of history to help us confront the challenges of the 21st century, from bridging the inequality gap and reducing the risks of genetic engineering, to reviving our faith in democracy and avoiding ecological collapse.

Comedians and writers Dom Joly and Danny Wallace take a look at conspiracy theories, fake news and more in this funny, frank and sometimes frightening discussion. Joly’s new book The Conspiracy Tourist: Travels Through a Strange World sees him meeting followers of QAnon in Cornwall, New Age-ers in Glastonbury and UFO hunters in Roswell, and taking a flat-earther to the edge of the world. In Wallace’s book Somebody Told Me he encounters families torn apart by accusations and fake news, journalists putting themselves on the frontline of the disinformation war, reformed conspiracy theorists and more.

Building on years of creative collaborations with survivors of terror attacks, Yordanka Dimcheva and Dr Katharina Karcher tell the stories of six inspiring people through three objects. From the narwhal tusk used by MoJ employee Darryn Frost and prisoner Steven Gallant in 2019 to tackle an armed attacker on London Bridge, to the camera of David Fritz Goeppinger, who survived the hostage-taking in the 2015 Bataclan attack, and the knitted teddy bear made by Figen Murray after losing her son in the Manchester Arena bombing, Karcher illustrates how creative practice can be used to remember violent loss, (re)claim agency and work towards less violent futures. Dimcheva is a PhD candidate in French Studies, focusing on terrorism in France, and Karcher is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Modern Languages, both at the University of Birmingham.

Looking for a new approach to life, a way to make your dreams reality and a stronger connection to yourself and those around you? Then author Candice Brathwaite (Manifest(o): Unlock the Life you Deserve) and consultant and coach Africa Brooke (The Third Perspective: Brave Expression in the Age of Intolerance) are here to help, in conversation with journalist Nichi Hodgson. Brooke shares her method for expressing yourself and embracing bravery, with the aim of placing you back in the driver’s seat of your own life. Brathwaite explores what manifesting looks like if you're not white, thin, traditionally pretty or able bodied. Prepare for a conversation that will leave you feeling inspired and ready to tackle any problem or achieve any dream.

“And how late it is…” So ended Franz Kafka’s final diary entry, dated 12 June 1923, less than a year before he died on 3 June 1924. The last weekend of this year’s Hay Festival coincides with the 100th anniversary of the last two days of Kafka’s life, a tragic moment in literary history but one also charged with hope, because of his irrepressible spirit and immortal work, which survived despite its author’s wishes.

To mark the centenary, the London Review of Books has mined its remarkable archive to publish a chorus of the different ways its writers have thought about Kafka over the years. This one-off performance is interspersed with readings from Kafka’s own later diary entries, with the voices of special guests accompanied by music from Max Richter’s The Blue Notebooks, itself inspired by Kafka’s journals, played by the celebrated organist James McVinnie.

'Rockstar mythologist' Natalie Haynes is the best-selling author of 'Divine Might', 'Stone Blind', and 'A Thousand Ships', as well as a reformed comedian who is a little bit obsessive about Ancient Greek and Rome. Today she stands up in the name of two great figures from the ancient world. Expect life-enhancing knowledge and entertaining stories from a millennium or so ago.

Gain a rare insight into the life of the legendary, late comedian Barry Cryer, whose work included BBC Radio 4’s long-running I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue. His son Bob Cryer speaks to actor Miriam Margolyes about the man behind the jokes. Filled with candour and warmth, this discussion is an ode to Barry Cryer’s incredible life and to the lessons he imparted on the art of comedy during his 60-year career.

Bob Cryer is an actor and writer best known for Coronation Street and Hollyoaks. With his father, he created the book series Mrs Hudson’s Diaries, which was adapted into a play for Wilton’s Music Hall. Mrs Hudson’s Radio Show soon followed for Radio 4 in 2018. Their joint podcast, Now Where Were We?, launched just before Barry Cryer’s death in 2022. His book Same Time Tomorrow? is about Barry Cryer's life and career. Cryer and Margolyes talk to Alex Clark.

Simon Armitage’s reinvention of a fairy tale, Hansel & Gretel: A Nightmare in Eight Scenes, was published in 2023. It’s the third book by the Poet Laureate to be illustrated by Clive Hicks-Jenkins, following Sir Gawain & the Green Knight in 2018 and The Owl and the Nightingale in 2021.

The Poet Laureate and the artist/illustrator hold a conversation with pictures, talking about their experiences of working together and reading favourite passages from the three books. Hicks-Jenkins directed and designed the music theatre production with actors and puppets of Armitage’s Hansel & Gretel when it premiered in 2018, and two members of the original cast make a special appearance.

Do you want to introduce your children to the magic and wonders of a festival, but can’t face the muddy fields? Then DJ Rob da Bank, co-founder of Camp Bestival, is here to help. He shares tips, activities and ideas to keep the whole family inspired all year round and recreate the magical ethos of the festival at home, with campfire singalongs, family raves, kitchen discos and more.

Join the literary director of Shakespeare and Company Adam Biles (author of Feeding Time and Beasts of England), with journalist and novelist Hari Kunzru (The Impressionist, Blue Ruin) Isabella Hammad (author of The Parisian and Enter Ghost) and other guests for a far-ranging conversation on the role writers play in our cultural discourse, the art of the author interview and the importance of independent bookshops.

Shakespeare and Company, Paris, is one of the world’s most iconic and beautiful bookshops. Long favoured as a meeting place for writers and readers, it has hosted events with some of the greatest authors of our age. Highlights from these conversations are captured in the new Shakespeare and Company Book of Interviews, bringing their insights together with warmth, sensitivity and humour.