Hay Festival 2024

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

Come to the Family Garden for a pizza masterclass with Kitchen Garden Pizza. In this one-hour session your imagination and creativity will be fed along with your belly! You’ll get your hands messy with freshly grown and foraged ingredients, make and top your own dough and observe the pizzaioli at work at the wood-fired oven. And while you wait for your pizza to cook, you can decorate your own pizza box!
Dairy-free and gluten-free options available.

We live in a world of feminist hash-tags, and Beyoncé, and the triumphant Lionesses bringing football home. But in the world of boys and men, the conversation seems darker. Boys falling behind in education; getting addicted to pornography; making up the majority of the prison population; scared of talking about their emotions. In her book What About Men?, Caitlin Moran looks at how men can find a way to talk about their problems in the way women have always talked about theirs.

What role can those who make us laugh play in helping us understand ourselves and the societies we live in? Our comics have always had to consider the question of ‘what can I say?’ as their professional work requires them to define the edges of comedy by what we find funny. But what can comedy teach us about pushing at the boundaries of life, navigating Cancel Culture and changing the status quo for the better? Stand-up Aditi Mittal (one of India’s top 10 comedians), comedy writer Joel Morris (author of Be Funny or Die) and actor Julian Rhind-Tutt (Green Wing, Notting Hill, The Witcher) talk to author and broadcaster Viv Groskop (host of chart-topping podcast How to Own the Room).

Growing plants, whether inside or outside, can foster feelings of happiness and bring people together. Community gardener and designer Tayshan Hayden-Smith and writer Alan Heeks discuss the importance of greenery of all kinds. Hayden-Smith’s Small Space Revolution: Planting Seeds of Change in Your Community sets out his blueprint for why we need to green more outdoor spaces and the practical steps we can all take to do so in our home or community. Heeks’ Natural Happiness shows how gardening methods like composting, mulching, and crop rotation can be used to cultivate human nature too.

Film maker Haz Dulull delivers a masterclass around making stories using gaming engines. What new opportunities exist in the next big global platform?

How did we get here, and where are we heading? Soak up some ideas from the globally-renowned artist and bestselling author Oliver Jeffers as he discusses his new picture book, Begin Again: The Story of How We Got Here and Where We Might Go. This powerful and thought-provoking visual examination of the state of the world builds upon Jeffers’ artistic exploration of humankind’s impact on itself and on our planet.

Please bring your own notebook and pen or pencil to this event.

Former Bardd Plant Cymru, Casi Wyn invites you to write your own poems and lyrics - inspired by the things that are important to us.Take a deep dive into your own imagination to find treasures and passions that only poetry and song can reveal. Casi is a familiar face in Wales, having composed original musical and lyrical works for the BBC National Orchestra of Wales and Sinfonia Cymru. She is Creative Director of Codi Pais, a magazine and independent publisher that platforms new and diverse voices in Wales.

Please bring your own notebook and pen or pencil to this event.

You are enough. You are interesting. Tell your story. Everybody can write. In this creative writing workshop Laura Dockrill, celebrated author of You Are a Story, shows how creativity can be your most valuable tool in living life your way. She opens the way to self-care, imagination and finding the stories that only you can tell. Whether you want to write for yourself or put your work out into the world, writing is for everyone.

Please bring your own notebook and pen or pencil to this event.

Come to the Family Garden for a pizza masterclass with Kitchen Garden Pizza. In this one-hour session your imagination and creativity will be fed along with your belly! You’ll get your hands messy with freshly grown and foraged ingredients, make and top your own dough and observe the pizzaioli at work at the wood-fired oven. And while you wait for your pizza to cook, you can decorate your own pizza box!
Dairy-free and gluten-free options available.

Three women journalists covering the Israel-Palestinian war speak candidly about their work in the Gaza strip and the challenges and difficulties of reporting from a conflict zone. Iraqi-born Hind Hassan began her career with Al Jazeera Media Network, worked as a reporter for Sky News and then joined VICE news (HBO). Dalia Hatuqa writes on Middle East politics for the Washington Post, Time, The Economist and the New York Times, dividing her time between the US and the West Bank. Lindsey Hilsum is Channel 4 News’ International Editor. Chaired by the British-Lebanese editor of the Financial Times.

Libraries are a lifeline for many, but they are all too often damaged or destroyed during times of conflict, either deliberately as repositories of cultural heritage or simply as collateral damage in a war zone. The attack on the National Library in Sarajevo, the bombing of Mosul University’s library and the ongoing devastation of libraries across Ukraine and Palestine are all recent examples of this shocking destruction.

Writers Priscilla Morris and Elif Shafak talk to Lord Paul Boateng, vice patron of charity Book Aid International, about what is lost when libraries are targeted or when people are displaced and access to libraries is taken away. They look at the role that libraries can play both during conflict and as a country begins to repair and consider why, even when people are displaced, books and libraries remain important.

Join Laura Dockrill, author, illustrator and judge of the 2024 Women's Prize for Fiction, and Kate Mosse, author and founding director of the Women's Prizes, in conversation with Isabella Hammad (Enter Ghost) and Claire Kilroy (Soldier Sailor) two of the writers shortlisted for the 2024 prize. They discuss their selected novels, their broader themes and the impact the prize has on both writers and readers.

The winner of the 2024 Women's Prize for Fiction will be announced on Thursday 13 June. Brought to you by the Women's Prize Trust, the charity which enriches society by creating equitable opportunities for women in the world of books and beyond.

Award-winning Nigerian writer Chigozie Obioma’s first novel The Fishermen was a finalist for the Booker prize, and his second, An Orchestra of Minorities, was also shortlisted. His latest book The Road to the Country intertwines myth and realism and is destined to stand alongside Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun as the defining novel of one of the most devastating civil wars of the 20th century. Set in Nigeria in the late 1960s, it’s the epic story of a shy, bookish student haunted by long-held guilt and shame who must go to war to free himself. When Kunle’s younger brother disappears as his country explodes in civil war, Kunle sets out on an impossible rescue mission and a journey of atonement. Obioma talks to the TLS Fiction and Politics Editor.

The food production experts talk to science presenter Kate Humble. Could cultivated meat from stem-cells grown in a bioreactor beat climate change? Provide real meat but without the slaughter? Cultivated Meat to Secure Our Future: Hope for Animals, Food Security, and the Environment, co-edited by Philip Lymbery, argues that it could be a game-changer in reducing animal suffering and helping solve the growing crisis of climate change, biodiversity loss, and the rise of ill-health. Ed Winters demonstrates How to Argue With a Meat Eater (and Win Every Time), explaining the principles of veganism as a way to create a more ethical, kind and sustainable world, and breaking down every argument used against it.

Memoir is an endlessly flexible and intriguing form – but how do you get to the heart of the story you’re trying to tell? And how do you share details, some of them intimate, while navigating other considerations, both ethical and artistic? Clover Stroud, author of bestselling memoirs The Wild Other, My Wild and Sleepless Nights, The Red of My Blood and the recent The Giant on the Skylines, shares insights on structure, style and voice, with hands-on writing exercises to help you find your story and identify your unique voice.

Bringing together all of the BBC’s supporters of unsigned music. Explore sessions from new and upcoming local musicians.

This year, more people around the world will have the opportunity to vote than any single year before, with major elections in a number of countries. To mark this historic milestone, our panel shares their unique perspectives on democracy and its relevance, fragility and value. Roula Khalaf, editor of the Financial Times, speaks to writers Aditi Mittal, Elif Shafak and Lola Shoneyin about the vital role of the media, of culture and of the participation of women in this critical year for the future of democracy.

In Nandini Das’ fascinating history of Britain’s first ambassador to the Mughal Empire Thomas Roe, Courting India: England, Mughal India and the Origins of Empire she offers an insider’s view of a Britain in the making, a country whose imperial seeds were just being sown. In conversation with historian David Olusoga she discusses her story of palace intrigue and scandal, lotteries and wagers that unfolds as global trade begins to stretch from Russia to Virginia, from West Africa to the Spice Islands of Indonesia.

Awarded for the best published literary work in the English language, written by an author aged 39 or under, the Dylan Thomas Prize celebrates the international world of fiction in all its forms. Join us to celebrate the 2024 winner in conversation with novelist Jon Gower, a member of the 2024 prize jury.

The shortlist for the Swansea University Dylan Thomas Prize 2024 is: Ayòbámi Adébáyò – A Spell of Good Things; Caleb Azumah Nelson – Small Worlds; AK Blakemore – The Glutton; Mary Jean Chan – Bright Fear; Eliza Clark – Penance; Camilla Grudova – The Coiled Serpent; Kevin Jared Hosein – Hungry Ghosts; Joshua Jones – Local Fires; Catherine Lacey – Biography of X; Michael Magee – Close To Home; Thomas Morris – Open Up; Kae Tempest – Divisible by Itself and One.