Hay Festival Winter Weekend 2023

There’s no time of year better for a bit of comfort eating than the cold, dark days of winter. A simple dish of beans and toast recalls childhood memories. A hearty soup warms us from the inside out. A rich hot chocolate gives us a moment of calm. Restaurant critic Grace Dent knows the value of comfort food for our bodies and minds. Talking to writer Oliver Bullough, she looks at what makes great comfort food and the foods we like to eat when no one is watching. Sharing her own favourites, Dent discusses what food can tell us about our lives, memories and experiences, and why we can find such joy in eating by ourselves.

Dent’s latest book Comfort Eating is inspired by the award-winning podcast of the same name, and is an intimate collection about the food we turn to behind closed doors, featuring interviews with people including Jo Brand, who loves fried bread sandwiches, and Scarlett Moffat, whose go-to snack is Wotsits-topped beans on toast. Dent is a columnist, broadcaster and author and the Guardian’s restaurant critic. Her memoir Hungry won the 2021 Fortnums Debut Book Award.

In this illuminating and intimate event, Baroness Lola Young sheds light on the oft-ignored foster care system, and her personal relationship with it. Before Baroness Young was an actress, an academic, an activist and a campaigner for social justice, she was a foster child, moved between countless placements and children’s homes between the ages of eight weeks and 18 years. Decades later, the crossbench peer was able to begin the search for answers to the long-standing questions that would help her make sense of her childhood.

She talks to actor and writer Paterson Joseph about searching through her care records, fragments of memory and her imagination to assemble the pieces of her past into a portrait of a childhood in a system that often made her feel invisible and unwanted.

Baroness Young of Hornsey became one of the first Black women members of the House of Lords in 2004. She is an active campaigner against modern slavery and unethical fashion and is Chancellor of the University of Nottingham. Joseph is a British actor and writer who has acted on shows including Vigil and Noughts and Crosses. He is the author of the historical novel The Secret Diaries of Charles Ignatius Sancho.

Listen in awe to the extraordinary tale of how writer and political advisor Chloe Dalton befriended a hare after moving to the countryside of her childhood. Dalton moved from the city to the country during lockdown, and found a newly born hare, no bigger than her palm and with no one to look after it. So she took it upon herself to be the custodian of the hare, bottle-feeding it and giving it a home in her house. Two years later, it still ran in from the fields when Dalton called it, and took naps in her house.

Dalton speaks to Hay Festival’s Director of Programmes and Engagement Helen Bagnall about the unusual bond between her and the hare, rekindling our sense of wonder towards nature and wildlife.

Join comedian Shaparak Khorsandi and musician Jordan Stephens for a humorous, life-affirming and honest conversation about self-discovery and taking care of yourself and your mental health. Khorsandi and Stephens discuss difficult topics with warmth and openness. The pair will discuss their memoirs, how fame affected their approach to mental health, and how they have fostered a healthier outlook by embracing both the negatives and positives in their lives. Khorsandi’s book Scatter Brain recounts how she was finally diagnosed with ADHD in her 40s, enabling her to look back on her life with a new lens and make sense of everything from her attraction to toxic men to her regular bouts of burnout. Khorsandi has become a fixture on our TV screens, making appearances on shows such as Mock The Week and Live at the Apollo.

Stephens found fame in his teens and 20s as one half of musical duo Rizzle Kicks, but with that came a pattern of self-harm, hedonism, destructive coping mechanisms and heartbreak. He tells his story in Avoidance, Drugs, Heartbreak & Dogs, which also looks at what it means to be a modern man, advocating for vulnerability and openness. Stephens’ mental health campaign #IAMWHOLE reached over 120 million people online and was mentioned in the Houses of Parliament.