Hay Festival 2023

It’s time for Oti’s dance class! You’ll move to the beat and learn some steps with Strictly Come Dancing champion and CBeebies Boogie Beebies host Oti Mabuse. Her lively, participatory event will explore rhythm and dance, inspired by her books Dance with Oti: The Bird Jive and The Lion Samba. Bring your grown-ups and shake a tail feather.

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 2.5 hour duration. Accompanying adults: please stay in attendance at all times, but you do not require a ticket.

Enjoy this half-hour open air performance between events. Formed from a group of community choirs spanning the Midlands, Got 2 Sing Choir perform contemporary, uplifting songs from top of the charts to golden oldies, with plenty of fun and laughter. The choir want to share their passion of singing with everyone – if you’re interested in joining, visit got2sing.co.uk.

Get involved in this engaging, hands-on workshop with professional film-makers and content producers, and ensure that your unique BookFlicks recommendations reach the widest audiences. BookFlicks is a youth-led project where you can create micro-short films about the books you love and share widely across social media. Bring your favourite book to showcase or be inspired by the Hay Festival Bookshop!

If possible, bring a smart phone and download CapCut (a free video editing app) to edit your BookFlicks film. If you don’t have access to a smartphone, we have a limited number that you can use. And don’t forget to bring your imagination!

Rural Media is an Arts Council England National Portfolio Organisation comprising the award-winning Rural Media Charity and its trading arm production house, Rural Studios. Founded in 1992, the organisation works locally and nationally using film, media and digital arts to educate, influence change and celebrate rural life.

Please note: During the workshop, you’ll be encouraged to explore the Hay Festival site to capture the content you need for your book recommendation, before coming back to the workshop to edit the footage together. By choosing to book onto the BookFlicks Workshop, you are agreeing to this, on behalf of yourself or a person in your care.

Most people can name a number of influential leaders and major battles of the past. Few can name the most destructive storms, the worst winters, the most devastating droughts. In this book, the historian shows that engagement with the natural world and with climatic change and their effects on us are not new. He explores the development of religion and language and their relationship with the environment, traces how growing demands for harvests resulted in the increase in slavery, and explains how efforts to understand and manipulate the weather have a long and deep history. From the beginning of recorded history to the present day, The Earth Transformed forces us to reckon with humankind's continuing efforts to make sense of the natural world. Peter Frankopan is Professor of Global History at Oxford University and Senior Research Fellow at Worcester College, Oxford.

A troubled teenage boy spends his night hours listening to the voices in his head: his teachers, his parents, the people he has hurt and the people who are trying to love him. In conversation with author Kim Sherwood (A Wild & True Relation), Max Porter, author of Grief is the Thing with Feathers and Lanny, tells the story of Shy, a boy escaping Last Chance, a home for ‘very disturbed young men’, and walking into the haunted space between his night terrors, his past and the heavy question of his future. A story about guilt, rage, imagination and boyhood, Porter’s novel offers hope that you’re not alone and lost in the dark.

The word ‘Windrush’ evokes both tragedy and triumph. The exuberance of arrival in 1948 is now tied up with the scandal of elderly black Britons who faced deportation decades later. Seventy-five years on the ship Windrush docked in Tilbury, Essex, the Royal Literary Fund’s WritersMosaic sees poets Raymond Antrobus (All the Names Given) and Hannah Lowe (The Kids), debut author Jacqueline Crooks (Fire Rush) and historian Colin Grant (I’m Black so You Don’t Have to Be) respond to the vibrant stories of Empire Windrush.

Acclaimed writer Jon Ronson and journalist and author Dolly Alderton discuss all things to do with the Culture Wars in the light of Jon’s award-winning BBC Radio 4 series and podcast, Things Fell Apart.

Get your pencils at the ready! It’s doodling time. You can learn how to draw Tom Gates and a host of other characters with author and illustrator Liz Pichon. She’ll answer your questions about her books, doodling and more. You can also find out everything about the newest Tom Gates book, Happy to Help (Eventually)! The Brilliant World of Tom Gates is an award-winning series on Sky Kids.

Come and join Rooted Forest School for outdoor family sessions inspired by the Forest School approach. We’ll use foraged materials to craft natural items that you can take away with you, taking part in some simple tool use and finishing off with a hot apple juice around the fire. These sessions are aimed at families and will run whatever the weather, so make sure you’re wrapped up for the conditions.

Named by the Guinness Book of Records as ‘the world’s greatest living explorer’, Ranulph Fiennes has spent his life in pursuit of extreme adventure, risking life and limb in some of the most ambitious expeditions ever undertaken. Join him to hear about some of the everyday lessons you can draw from his extraordinary life. Among Fiennes’ achievements are crossing both Polar ice caps on foot, climbing Everest and the Eiger, and circumnavigating the world along its polar axis – a 53,000-mile odyssey that has never been repeated.

A landslide has closed the Korowai Pass in New Zealand’s South Island, leaving a sizable farm abandoned. This land offers an opportunity to ‘Birnam Wood’, a guerrilla gardening collective who plant crops where no one will notice. But they hadn’t figured on the enigmatic American billionaire, Robert Lemoine, also having an interest in the place. Can they trust him? And, as their ideals and ideologies are tested, can they trust each other?

The first novel in a decade from the Booker Prize-winning author, Birnam Wood is a brilliantly constructed tale of intentions, actions, and consequences, a skewering of political certainties, and an unflinching examination of the human impulse for survival. Ultimately, the reader is left to wonder: who will survive, and what will be left of them?

Eleanor Catton is the author of The Luminaries, winner of the Man Booker Prize and a global bestseller. She talks to The TLS fiction and politics editor Toby Lichtig.

Thea Lenarduzzi’s Dandelions is a family memoir and social history which explores the evocative power of shared language and stories tracing four generations of migration between Italy and England. Colombian author Pilar Quintana’s The Abyss leads us brilliantly into the lonely heart of the child we have all once been, driven by fear of abandonment, through the character of impressionable eight-year-old Claudia. The authors discuss family relations and gender inequality through their books, with author and translator Daniel Hahn.

Ian McMillan hosts his cabaret of the word, featuring the best poetry, writing and performance.

Don’t stand us up for this very special in conversation event with Alice Oseman, creator of global smash-hit coming-of-age romance Heartstopper, and sensational book influencer and Hay Festival Thinker in Residence, Jack Edwards. We follow the story of Nick and Charlie, two teenage boys who meet at grammar school, quickly become friends and fall in love. The book navigates the ups and downs of first loves, friendships, coming out and mental health, beautifully framed by a warm cast of supporting characters.

Heartstopper started life as a webcomic, quickly becoming an online sensation with over 100 million views. The #1 Sunday Times and New York Times bestselling graphic novels that followed have brought this charming love story to even more readers. Now it’s a critically acclaimed major Netflix series, written by Oseman herself.

So come along to hear her talk about the incredible journey so far and maybe even get a special sneak peek at what’s to come in Heartstopper volume five…

Come and join Rooted Forest School for outdoor family sessions inspired by the Forest School approach. We’ll use foraged materials to craft natural items that you can take away with you, taking part in some simple tool use and finishing off with a hot apple juice around the fire. These sessions are aimed at families and will run whatever the weather, so make sure you’re wrapped up for the conditions.

Contributors: Sophie Howe, first Future Generations Commissioner for Wales; Lee Waters, Deputy Minister for Climate Change.

Chaired by Tom Bullough, author of Sarn Helen.

With the climate and ecological emergency, humanity faces perhaps its greatest ever threat. In many ways, Wales has been a leader in this field but the challenges remain immense. For ‘Green Wales’, two of the most eminent figures in Welsh politics discuss our present situation and explain what we must do to secure our future.

With multiple Grammys and Brit Awards to her name, the music icon and global superstar last year revealed another string to her bow – as a talented and engaging interviewer on her podcast, Dua Lipa: At Your Service.

Dua’s love of books is no secret. As well as the likes of Elton John and Monica Lewinsky, Dua’s podcast has featured numerous star writers including Hanya Yanagihara, Min Jin Lee and Lisa Taddeo. Fresh from her Future Nostalgia world tour, Dua joins us at Hay Festival for an exclusive recording of her podcast featuring author Douglas Stuart, for a deep dive into his Booker Prize winning Shuggie Bain.