Society & Health

Anger, despair, disillusionment. The state of our politics is such these days that all those feelings regularly sweep over us. But political journalist Rafael Behr (Politics – A Survivor’s Guide: How to Stay Engaged Without Getting Enraged) and strategist and writer Alastair Campbell (The Rest is Politics podcast host; author of But What Can I Do? Why Politics Has Gone So Wrong, and How You Can Help Fix It) are here to demonstrate that you can stay engaged with politics without getting enraged. Using their expert knowledge, the pair take us through how we can play our part and make a real difference, develop our skills of advocacy and persuasion, and campaign for change. Even if we find ourselves frustrated with politics, Behr and Campbell show us there’s always something we can do.
They talk to BBC Culture Editor Katie Razzall.

Adventurer Grylls recounts some truly hair-raising escapades from his life, and shares the daily tips he’s learned to help you build your mental resilience. Grylls speaks about stories from his memoir Never Give Up, capturing the reality behind some of the hairiest survival missions he's undertaken, gives a rare insight into his family life, and shares with vulnerability his most death-defying and life-defining moments. He also imparts advice from his new book Mind Fuel, a constructive and authentic self-help manual that shares the principles that have helped him overcome fear, develop a positive mindset and break through the obstacles that limit success in everyday life.
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Grylls is in conversation with adventurer Tori James, the first Welsh woman to climb Everest.

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.

Our food system is one of the most successful, most innovative and most destructive industries on earth. It sustains us, but it is also killing us. Henry Dimbleby, co-founder of fast food chain Leon, creator of the National Food Strategy and author of Ravenous: How to get Ourselves and our Planet Into Shape, talks about how we can take action to make things better, drawing on health, farming, and environmental and food security.

As nurses and ambulance workers have gone on strike to demand better pay, conditions and protection for patients, the future of the NHS has once again come to the forefront of national concern. Join Professors Sally Moyle and Sandra Nicholson for a discussion on how, in the face of unfilled vacancies and a retention drain, we secure the future of the NHS workforce. Moyle is pro-vice chancellor for health and science at the University of Worcester, and a nurse and experienced workforce planner. Nicholson is a GP and founding dean of the Three Counties Medical School and chair of the Association for the Study of Medical Education.

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.

Checking into a psychiatric institution wasn’t on broadcaster and comedian Ruby Wax’s agenda for 2022, and neither was writing about it in her new book, I’m Not as Well as I Thought I Was. But with rawness and honesty, she takes us into the depths of her psyche and shows us what trauma can do to someone. Reflecting on years of personal and professional experience, she opens up about her struggles with mental health and different treatments over the years. This intimate event offers hope, reassurance and guidance to anyone struggling with their own mental health.

The consultation industry, argue authors Mariana Mazzucato and Rosie Collington, has made its way to the heart of our economies and governments, resulting in everything from getting in the way of our attempts to halt climate change to muddying political accountability. In The Big Con: How the Consulting Industry Weakens our Businesses, Infantilizes our Governments and Warps our Economies, they debunk the myth that consultancies always add value to the economy with original research and recommendations for how to make sure the role of consultants works for economies and governments that are fit for purpose.

Aged 43, now mayor of London Khan was unexpectedly diagnosed with adult-onset asthma, and so began his journey to becoming more educated about the dangers posed by air pollution and climate change. In Breathe: Tackling the Climate Emergency, he shares how he underwent a political transformation that would see him become one of the most prominent global politicians fighting elections on green issues, talks about some of the ways in which he believes the environmental discussion can be put back on track, and shares how anyone can win the argument on climate. Khan was first elected mayor in 2016, and re-elected in 2021. In conversation with science writer, broadcaster and author of Nomad Century, Gaia Vince.

Diana Evans, whose 2018 novel Ordinary People won the South Bank Sky Arts Award for Literature, returns with a new London-set story, A House for Alice. Following a family whose matriarch, the titular Alice, decides after 50 years of living in London that she wants to live out the rest of her days in the land of her birth – Nigeria – the novel is a look at family secrets and tensions set against the shadows of the Grenfell disaster and a country in turmoil. Dani Shapiro’s most recent novel Signal Fires is a meditation on family, memory, and the healing power of interconnectedness, telling the story of two families bound together in ways they never could have imagined.

Explore Ayurveda, the ancient sister science of Yoga, with Emma Bonnici, founder of Kanga Wellbeing. Discover your body type and dosha, and ignite your digestive fire to balance your body and mind, diving deep into the depths of your true nature. According to the Ayurveda system, people have different biological body types, and our biological energies vary according to our lifestyles. It is vital to maintain balance in the body to stay healthy and to transcend though the body and mind to connect with your spirit, your soul, your higher power and the source of your being: inner bliss. Ayurveda aims to maintain health in the body by keeping you in balance with the five elements of life (earth, water, fire, air and space).

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.

Tim Spector has pioneered a science-based approach to nutrition, and in Food for Life: The New Science of Eating Well he delivers a guide to what we should know about food today, from environmental impact and food fraud to allergies and deceptive labelling. Spector is a professor of genetic epidemiology at King's College London. Chris van Tulleken explains that most of our calories today come from ultra-processed foods (UPF), which make up to 60% of our diet. An NHS doctor, he reveals in Ultra-Processed People: Why do we all eat Stuff That Isn’t Food … and Why Can’t we Stop? what UPF is doing to our bodies, from altering metabolism to an increased risk of cardiovascular disease and dementia. Crucially, he also provides solutions. In conversation with Rachel Clarke is a palliative care doctor and author of Breathtaking: Inside the NHS in a Time of Pandemic.

PRESENTED BY DE BALIE

Europe has always been a haven for people fleeing repression, where freedom of the press, freedom of speech and expression are guaranteed. But is that still true? In 2021, the International Federation of Journalists reported that six journalists had been killed that year and 95 others were in prison in Europe. Why does Europe fail to acknowledge the pressure journalists are under in an increasingly violent climate? How can we support journalists in protecting democracy and freedom? Journalists from across Europe discuss the challenges they face. ​Veronika Munk is a journalist and former editor-in-chief of the independent news platform Telex.hu in Hungary; Antonio Baquero is an investigative journalist in Spain covering organized crime and corruption worldwide; Irina Nedeva is senior editor at Horizon Radio in Bulgaria, committed to defending human rights, art, media and freedom of speech.

TikTok comedian and podcaster Fatima, known as Fats, is here to tell you that you are the hero that your story needs. Born with the genetic condition achondroplasia, which affects the growth of bones, she’s had to develop her superpower. In Main Character Energy, she shares how through the good and the bad times, she’s learned a few lessons which have made her fearless, and taught her how to be her own champion. With some sage advice and more than a few jokes, Fats teaches you how to embody main character energy with her 10 commandments for living fearlessly.

Fats Timbo is in conversation with TikTok creator Benjy Kusi, author of Hope this Helps.

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.

The Covid-19 pandemic was a life-changing and terrifying event, with the world engulfed by panic and the search for a vaccine. But in Foreign Bodies: Pandemics, Vaccines and the Health of Nations, historian Simon Schama shows how the world has survived similar pandemics before in this new history. Covering smallpox in London, cholera in Paris and plague in India, Schama takes us on a journey of terror, suffering and hope through the eyes of a cast of characters including doctors, patients, scientists and more, centering on Waldemar Haffkine, a gun-toting Jewish student in Odessa turned microbiologist at the Pasteur Institute. Join Schama for a thrilling and inspirational story of people winning in the toughest of times.

One of the UK’s best-known poets and storytellers, Michael Rosen caught Covid-19 towards the beginning of the pandemic, becoming seriously ill and being placed in a coma by doctors so he could get better. Join him in conversation with Rachel Clarke as he discusses his new memoir Getting Better, the follow-up to 2021’s Many Different Kinds of Love, in which explores the role of trauma, asks how it’s possible to live well again after a tragedy such as a chronic illness or the loss of a loved one and ponders what it means to be recovered. Rosen, a former children’s laureate, is the author of more than 140 books. Rachel Clarke is a palliative care doctor and author of Breathtaking: Inside the NHS in a Time of Pandemic.

Doctors Henry Marsh, author of And Finally: Matters of Life and Death, and Rachel Clarke, author of Breathtaking, have worked in Ukraine during the war, visiting hospitals and helping local doctors treat their patients, and are now setting up a charity. Olesya Khromeychuk is a historian of 20th century East–Central Europe, specialising in Ukrainian history. They talk to Emma Graham-Harrison, the Guardian’s foreign affairs correspondent, about Ukraine and people’s day-to-day ordeal in a time of conflict.

What makes a brilliant teacher? Andria Zafirakou, winner of the 2018 Global Teacher Prize, discusses some of the answers with psychotherapist Maxine Mei-Fung Chung. In her new book Lessons in Life, Zafirakou talks to 30 of the world’s best teachers, who share their insight and wisdom into what teachers can do to help children become compassionate, contented and successful grown-ups, as well as conscientious global citizens. Zafirakou, a teacher at Alperton Community School in Brent in London, used her $1 million winnings from the Global Teacher Prize to set up the Artists in Residence charity, which aims to improve arts education in schools.

Learn about the simple changes you can make to lead a longer and healthier life, as Professor Rose Anne Kenny shares her pioneering research from 35 years of experience at the forefront of ageing medicine in her book Age Proof: The new Science of Living a Longer and Healthier Life. She shows us that 80% of our ageing biology is within our control, and distils scientific theory into practical advice that we can apply to our everyday lives, looking at the impact that food, genetics, friendships, purpose, sex, exercise and laughter have on how our cells age.