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 key speakers to be announced, we’ll look at the key issue of mobility. 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.

Creating sustainable mobility goes far beyond reducing emissions. Greening how we all travel will improve the lives and livelihoods of billions of citizens around the world. How dramatically are we willing to change the way we move? How might a combination of new technologies, walking and cycling radicalise our behaviour and innovate what we take for granted? We want to hear your experiences. Come to share ideas that will inspire new ways to move around efficiently and sustainably.

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.

Enjoy a little light ridicule, mockery and fun to start the day as the satirists read the papers and see what’s trending online. An irreverent look at what’s tickling the nation’s fancy – and driving it to splenetic fury – today. Strong coffee recommended.

Before Charles became King, he was Prince of Wales. Charles’ approach to the role has been to serve Wales and to promote Welsh life. But what impact has he had on the country, and what impression did the Welsh leave on him? Huw Thomas, Business Correspondent at BBC Wales and author of Charles: The King and Wales, discusses the role and the man. ​He is interviewed by Welsh broadcasting legend Roy Noble of Aberdare, OBE and former Vice Lord Lieutenant of Mid Glamorgan.

Channel the power to change the way you look at your entire life in this workshop with wellness industry expert Bhavini Vyas. She’ll share her theory on how the space between happenings is actually where our life happens, and how connecting to this space can inject us with renewed purpose, passion and power.

Bhavini is host of the Your Wellbeing podcast and curates the Mind Body Spirit UK festivals. Having taught thousands of people how to connect to the core of their being, through breathwork, Vedic meditation, yoga and philosophy, Bhavini is an authority on guiding us into the space between and how to live our lives with real mastery.

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.

Guides from the Brecon Beacons National Park will lead a gentle walk through the beautiful surrounds of Hay-on-Wye. Experts from the Park will take you on a tour of the local historic environment. You’ll be joined by a guest from the Festival programme.

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.

Imagine how boring the world would be if everyone was the same. You’re all amazing! George Webster, CBeebies’ first presenter with Down’s syndrome, shows how every child is unique and that difference is a wonderful thing. George is joined by his co-author and CBeebies producer Claire Taylor and This is Me illustrator Tim Budgen

Celebrate your differences with Webster, an Ambassador for Mencap and a star of Strictly Come Dancing 2022, in this joyous event exploring his hugely uplifting picture book about George, a boy with an exceptionally big heart. This is Me will bring out the glow in everyone!

Transform your drawings and collages of minibeasts into a cacophony of colour using a Risograph machine. You’ll come out of this session with your own prints to take home. Risograph is a method of printing using a stencil printing machine originating in Japan and printing on 100% recycled paper. The workshop is led by Jess Bugler RCA, a contemporary print artist based in Hereford and Print Technician at Hereford College of Arts (jessbugler.co.uk).

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.

Drop in and watch aspiring performers, musicians and designers from Hereford College of Arts come together to create an uplifting, joyous short outdoor performance celebrating the poetry of the current Waterstones Children’s Laureate, Joseph Coelho.

Transform your drawings and collages of minibeasts into a cacophony of colour using a Risograph machine. You’ll come out of this session with your own prints to take home. Risograph is a method of printing using a stencil printing machine originating in Japan and printing on 100% recycled paper. The workshop is led by Jess Bugler RCA, a contemporary print artist based in Hereford and Print Technician at Hereford College of Arts (jessbugler.co.uk).

The BBC’s Chief International Correspondent and senior presenter Lyse Doucet speaks about how to keep people engaged and what the media can change to make news matter. Doucet has covered news in countries including Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iran, and has been on the ground for pivotal moments, including the coalition withdrawal from Afghanistan after the Taliban offensive in the country in 2021, and the war in Ukraine. Doucet has created multiple documentaries over the years, including Children of Syria and Children of the Gaza War. Her lecture is followed by a Q&A with senior international affairs correspondent at the Guardian and Observer Emma Graham-Harrison.

Nature writer Roger Deakin helped popularise wild swimming with Waterlog, published in 1999. He was a polymath, adventurer, romantic and rebel who embraced self-sufficiency, teaching and environmentalism, acquiring a 16th-century farmhouse in the 1970s and rebuilding it from the oak beams up. Discover more about Deakin’s inner life with the Guardian’s natural history writer Patrick Barkham, author of this definitive biography. The Swimmer is told primarily in Deakin’s own words, with Barkham drawing on notebooks, diaries, letters, recordings and more to access his work.

The British-Ghanaian writer and photographer Caleb Azumah Nelson introduces us to Stephen, whose problems are forgotten in music and dance. Dancing at church, with his parents and brother, the shimmer of Black hands raised in praise; he might have lost his faith, but he does believe in rhythm. Dancing with his band, making music that speaks to the hardships and the joys of their lives. Dancing with his best friend Adeline, two-stepping around the living room, crooning and grooving, so close their heads might touch. Dancing alone, at home, to his father's records, uncovering parts of a man he has never truly known. But what becomes of him when the music fades? When his father begins to speak of shame and sacrifice, when his home is no longer his own? Set over the course of three summers in Stephen's life, from London to Ghana and back again, Small Worlds is an expansive novel about the worlds we build for ourselves, the worlds we live, dance and love within. Nelson’s first novel, Open Water, won the Costa Book Award for First Novel and Debut Novel of the Year British Book Award. Join him as he talks to journalist and editor Alex Clark about creating the novel’s music-filled world.

Reach for the stars with real-life astronomer Dr Sheila Kanani as she introduces her new book Can You Get Rainbows in Space?, a compendium of space, science and light, told through the colours of the rainbow.

Learn lots of amazing facts such as: why is the world ‘going green’? Is the sky really blue? And what is ultraviolet light? – before being blown away by some colourful science demonstrations and even taking part in one yourself! Dr Sheila will introduce you to all the amazing jobs in the world of space and science to encourage you to dream big.

Enjoy this half-hour open air performance between events. A crew of landlubbers singing rollicking shanties here on the East Coast of Wales. Enjoyment is guaranteed or else you’ll walk the plank!

Hay Shantymen have been together for over six years, raising over £7,000 for the RNLI. Last year their many performances included Latitude, Falmouth International Shanty Festival and a sell-out gig in Hay Castle. They're proud to have recorded their first album this year: Songs from the Shedis available from their website hayshantymen.com.

Divorced, beheaded, died. Divorced, beheaded, survived. Alison Weir’s Six Tudor Queens series covered the lives, loves and deaths of Henry VIII’s wives; now, she turns her attention to the monarch himself in her newest book. The novel recounts Prince Harry’s life as a second son, and his ascendance to the throne when his older brother dies an untimely death. Weir discusses her most ambitious Tudor novel yet, which reveals the captivating story of a man who was by turns brilliant, romantic, and ruthless, and was undoubtedly a king who changed England forever.

Fleeing war, economic difficulties, the effects of climate change and more, contemporary refugees and migrants get a bad press in the UK, yet society commemorates historic refugees, celebrating their successes and their contributions to all aspects of life. Andrea Hammel explores comparisons between refugees and migrants who arrived at different times during the 20th and 21st century and looks at what we can learn from history about overcoming the challenges our society and the migrants and refugees face. Hammel is reader in the modern languages department and director of the Centre for the Movement of People at Aberystwyth University.

BBC Radio 3’s Lunchtime Concert series is presented by Sarah Walker and explores the music of Schubert and others. This second of four recitals broadcast during the Hay Festival week offers a selection of songs by Schubert, Schumann, Strauss, Wolf and Kashani, performed by Soraya Mafi (soprano) and Ian Tindale (piano).

Recorded for broadcast on BBC Radio 3. Please arrive in good time.

Patrick Kane was just nine months old when he contracted meningococcal septicaemia in 1998, leading to him becoming a triple amputee. In 2010, he became the youngest person in the world to be fitted with a bionic arm, and has gone on to carry the Olympic torch as part of the London 2012 Olympic Games and speak at TEDxTeen. Now a motivational speaker and campaigner, Kane’s Human 2.0, illustrated by Sam Rodriguez, looks at the leaps in medical engineering and the people he’s met, including Paralympians Richard Whitehead and Blake Leeper, and the world’s first ‘cyborg’ Neil Harbisson.