Hay Festival 2023

Start your day with a morning yoga class designed to reinvigorate your energy and spirit. Enjoy a grounding, energising, alignment‐based yoga practice, using the breath and sound to rediscover and rejuvenate the body and mind. Beginners and experienced students are most welcome. Yoga mats and props are provided.

Please contact Kanga Wellbeing on spa@kangaevents.com for any questions relating to these classes. As capacity is limited, we recommend booking in advance to avoid disappointment.

Kanga Wellbeing will also be onsite throughout the Festival offering wellbeing and a wide range of holistic massage therapies. Therapies will be held in cosy lotus belle tents with heaters and fans. For more information or to book, please visit www.kangaevents.com/hay-festival. For enquiries, please email spa@kangaevents.com.

Bring your best ideas to this solutions-focused workshop session. Facilitated by sustainability entrepreneur Andy Middleton, Chief Exploration Officer at the TYF Group, and joined by Philip Lymbery, Global CEO of farm animal welfare charity, Compassion in World Farming International and Jane Davidson, former Chair of the Wales Inquiry of Food, Farming and Countryside Commission and current Chair of Wales Net Zero 2035, we’ll look at the key issue of food. We’ll discuss the scale of the issue and a range of solutions, how to action them, how they might impact on their lives and how to manage the change.

Food supplies are under intense pressure and what we’ve taken for granted is no longer guaranteed. To continue functioning, local economies and sustainable livelihoods must be able to thrive, both in the UK and all producer countries. Plant and animal diversity, as well as the welfare of farmed and wild species, must be protected. How can we design a food production system that reverses damage to nature and restores climate balance?

This workshop is part of our Hay Festival Planet Assembly, a daily, inclusive conversation over ten days involving lay people, scientists, commentators and experts. We want to empower everyone to be accelerators and multipliers for the dramatic policy transformations that are needed immediately to tackle the acute climate and biodiversity emergencies.

Sign up to our free Planet Assembly daily briefing.

The world today – what would Dickens say? Barbara Kingsolver talks to Tom Sutcliffe about her retelling of David Copperfield: her eponymous hero must struggle to survive amid America’s opioid crisis. Michael Rosen has imagined his own modern Oliver Twist and reflects on the unspoken grief and trauma of recent years. And while Natalie Haynes’s favourite Dickens adaptation is The Muppet Christmas Carol, she explores how the telling and retelling of stories and ancient myths shines a light on our contemporary world.

Come to Andrew and Rachel Giles’ farm with local vet Barney Sampson and agronomist Jonathon Harrington to see how their herd of dairy cows produce most of their milk from grass. You can enter the milking parlour and help to milk some of the cows, as well as see the young calves. Learn how the cows are fed and find out how their four stomachs enable them to digest grass. You can taste samples of the dairy products, and a local cheese maker will explain the art and science beneath the rind.

With thanks to Andrew & Rachel Giles for welcoming us to their farm.

Please wear walking boots or Wellingtons and waterproof clothing in case of inclement weather. These are visits to real working farms and are suitable for anyone interested in learning more about food and farming. Families are welcome but children must be supervised at all times.

There are few people better placed than Kate Bingham, Ilan Gur and Patrick Vallance ​discuss the role of science in tackling future health challenges. As chair of the UK Vaccine Taskforce, Bingham was responsible for making sure the Covid-19 vaccine was administered as fast as possible to as many people as possible, a task she recounts in The Long Shot. ​She has spent 30 years in biotech investing, which has resulted in the launch of eight drugs for the treatment of patients with inflammatory and autoimmune disease and cancer. Ilan Gur is CEO of ARIA, a research and development funding agency working to further the UK’s world-class research capacities and supporting transformative science to change the way we live. Vallance served as the government’s chief scientific adviser until April this year, and became a familiar and reassuring face to many during the Covid-19 lockdowns. ​Before this Patrick was president for research and development at GlaxoSmithKline a key experience that meant he saw the need to create the Vaccine Taskforce in 2020.

Having spent a lifetime studying Europe, Timothy Garton Ash gives his account of a period of unprecedented progress on the continent, calling on citizens to understand and defend what we have collectively achieved in conversation. In conversation with writer and Institute of Human Science (Vienna) rector Misha Glenny, Garton Ash shares vivid experiences from his book Homelands, including his father's memories of D-Day, interviewing Polish dockers, Albanian guerrillas in the mountains of Kosovo, and angry teenagers in the poorest quarters of Paris, as well as advising prime ministers, chancellors and presidents.

Guides from the Brecon Beacons National Park will lead a gentle walk through the beautiful surrounds of Hay-on-Wye, joined by the BBNP Writer in Residence Rebecca Thomas.

Hay-on-Wye is based within 520 square miles of beautiful landscape that makes up Bannau Brycheiniog (Brecon Beacons) National Park. The National Park is driving change to bring about a sustainable future, meeting our needs within planetary boundaries. Their Hay Festival series of gentle walks will take you into the town’s local environment while offering the opportunity to learn more about the Park’s work and its treasured landscape.

Please wear appropriate footwear and outdoor gear.

It’s 60 years since the publication of John Burningham’s touching tale, Borka: The Adventures of a Goose with No Feathers. One of the goslings in Mr & Mrs Plumpster’s gaggle is born looking a bit different. Borka has no feathers and cannot fly. When winter comes the other geese fly off in search of warmer climates, leaving Borka all alone. Can she find her own place in the world?

Performing arts company Ignite Music celebrates the anniversary with a magical children’s opera based on Burningham’s book, by Tim Yealland and Russell Hepplewhite, including live music, puppetry and digital animation.

The story of animation stretches back to the early 1800s with the invention of spinning optical illusion devices such as the zoetrope. These days animation is everywhere from animated films, cartoons and GIFs to computer games and VR. But how did we get here? Learn about the origins of early animation and create your own loopy animation in this fun, hands-on workshop led by visual artists MASH Cinema.

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.

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. Listen out for some traditional and contemporary folk from the Rolling Home Band. A group of musicians from various folk bands and ensembles, the band comes together to play special festival performances.

Find out how master storyteller Kingsolver reimagined Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield for her new novel, placing her version in the southern Appalachian Mountains of Virginia. Demon Copperhead, who gives the book its title, is born to a single mother in a single-wide trailer, in an area where poverty is all around, and the opioid crisis is striking neighbours, parents and friends. Demon craves affection and safety – and a glimpse of the ocean – and his tale of love and loss shows just how he’ll travel to try and get there. Kingsolver has been shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize, and in 2010 won what is now the Women’s Prize for fiction for her novel The Lacuna.

There will not be a book signing after this event.

Journalist Daniel Finkelstein’s family story is one of miraculous survival against the 20th century’s two genocidal dictators. His grandfather Alfred is now widely acknowledged to have been the first person to recognise the existential danger Hitler posed to the Jews, and with his family was sent to Bergen-Belsen, while his father’s family was sent to do hard labour in a Siberian gulag. In Hitler, Stalin, Mum & Dad, Finkelstein, who serves in the House of Lords, shares his family’s extraordinary, often painful and hellish history through concentration camps, the Gulag, secret archives and freezing wastelands, to eventual happiness and safety. He talks to Philippe Sands, author of East West Street and The Ratline.

Explore the political, cultural and mythical history of Wales, and get a glimpse of what lies ahead for us all when it comes to climate change, with writers Tom Bullough and Julie Brominicks. In Sarn Helen, Bullough takes us on a walk along Sarn Helen – Helen’s Causeway – the old Roman Road that runs from the south of Wales to the north, weaving in conversations with climate scientists and showing the likely impact of climate change on Wales, while Brominicks celebrates the language, landscape, peoples and biodiversity of Cymru past and present in The Edge of Cymru, exploring themes of belonging and cymreictod (Welshness), trying to find clarity, courage and possibility in the environmental crisis.

Rana Mitter is joined by a panel of writers to look at our relationship with landscapes and the natural world. Kapka Kassabova’s Elixir: In the Valley at the End of Time details her stay in a remote valley by the River Mesa in Albania; Patrick Barkham is talking at the Hay Festival about Roger Deakin, the environmentalist and Noreen Masud has written a memoir called A Flat Place.

Prepare yourself for an exciting prehistoric adventure with TV scientist Garrod, exploring the biggest, deadliest and weirdest predators that ever roamed the planet. Garrod’s unique mix of humour and science will shine a new light on the ever popular world of dinosaurs. Garrod is professor of evolutionary biology and science engagement at the University of East Anglia, and worked with Sir David Attenborough on the BBC’s Attenborough and the Mammoth Graveyard documentary.

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.

The story of animation stretches back to the early 1800s with the invention of spinning optical illusion devices such as the zoetrope. These days animation is everywhere from animated films, cartoons and GIFs to computer games and VR. But how did we get here? Learn about the origins of early animation and create your own loopy animation in this fun, hands-on workshop led by visual artists MASH Cinema.

Enjoy this half-hour open air performance between events. Listen out for some traditional and contemporary folk from the Rolling Home Band. A group of musicians from various folk bands and ensembles, the band comes together to play special festival performances.