Hay Festival 2024

Worldbuilding is the key to captivating stories in films, television and gaming as well as books. You’ll have fun working together in this interactive session to help you create your own unique world. Gita Ralleigh is the author of The Destiny of Minou Moonshine and The Voyage of Sam Singh, both magical adventures set in a parallel colonial India.

Do you ever get stuck for a story idea, or when you’ve started writing quickly run out of steam? Author Emma Carroll (The Somerset Tsunami, The Week at World’s End) shares tips on how to fire your imagination in this fun, interactive workshop, searching out potential ideas and inspirations to encourage you to keep writing. You’ll consider how the unique experience of being you can be useful when writing, as well as trying out some short exercises to warm up your creativity so you’re ready to put pen to paper.

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.

Enjoy a half-hour open air performance between events. A crew of local landlubbers singing rollicking, traditional sea shanties in a cappella three-part harmony, as well as other songs on a nautical theme. Enjoyment is guaranteed or else you’ll walk the plank!

Hay Shantymen have been together for over seven years, raising more than £10,000 for the RNLI. They’ve performed widely, including Latitude and Falmouth International Shanty Festival. In 2023 they wrote a shanty of their own (‘Seaweed Revolution’), performed at the Natural History Museum in London. Their album Songs from the Shed is available at hayshantymen.com.

The most talked about British story of the year so far has been the Post Office scandal, thanks to a television drama. ITV’s Mr Bates vs The Post Office, starring Toby Jones as the titular Mr Bates, dramatised the case of hundreds of subpostmasters across the UK who were wrongly prosecuted after faulty computer software found money missing from post office branches.

Join Toby Jones to discuss both his role in this series, and his extensive TV and film career as one of the UK's most regarded stage and screen actors, and to discuss the power in television and film to shed light on human stories.

The Nobel Prize-winning biologist and former president of the Royal Society explores the science of why and how we age and die. The knowledge of death is so terrifying that we live most of our lives in denial of it, and our fear has underpinned our religions, inspired our cultures, and driven our science. Today giant strides are being made in our understanding of death, and immortality might even be within our grasp. But what are the social and ethical costs of attempting to live forever? He talks to the Radio 4 broadcaster and president of the British Humanist Association.

Sarah Marsh discusses her accomplished debut, inspired by her experiences of growing up deaf and her family’s history of deafness. Receiving an unexpected visit from Alexander Graham Bell, Ellen Lark knows at once what he wants from her. Ellen is deaf, and for a time was Bell’s student, when he confided in her his dream of producing a device to transmit the human voice along a wire: the telephone. Now, Bell wants Ellen to speak up in support of his claim to the patent, which is being challenged by rivals. But she has a different story to tell: that of how Bell betrayed her, and other deaf pupils, in pursuit of ambition and personal gain. Marsh talks to historian Professor Suzannah Lipscomb.

There will be a BSL interpreter at this event

Join us for a recording of The Verb, BBC Radio 4’s poetry celebration and ‘language lock-in’, hosted by its kindly pub-landlord Ian McMillan. In our special festival editions Ian has invited a host of award-winning poets, writers and performers to join him on stage for a spoken word party. His guests include poets Simon Armitage, Owen Sheers, Hanan Issa and Joseph Coelho.

Dermot O’Leary, the popular presenter and author of the Toto the Ninja Cat series, swoops into Hay Festival to tell us all about his brand new action-adventure story with a feathery twist. Wings of Glory is a wartime tale guaranteed to make you laugh and cry – featuring courageous loop-the-loops, top secret plans and more than a smattering of bird poo!

Unlock the mystic art of curse writing in this hands-on ‘invocations’ workshop, where you’ll craft personalised spells with Krystal Sutherland, inspired by the witchy world of The Invocations. Join the bestselling author for an enchanting session of creativity and magic, and leave with your own bespoke curse. No humans are harmed in the making of this curse!

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

Do you ever get stuck for a story idea, or when you’ve started writing quickly run out of steam? Author Emma Carroll (The Somerset Tsunami, The Week at World’s End) shares tips on how to fire your imagination in this fun, interactive workshop, searching out potential ideas and inspirations to encourage you to keep writing. You’ll consider how the unique experience of being you can be useful when writing, as well as trying out some short exercises to warm up your creativity so you’re ready to put pen to paper.

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.

The botanist draws on her expertise and experience as an indigenous woman to show how other living beings offer us gifts and lessons, even if we’ve forgotten how to hear their voices. Her subjects range from the Native American legend of the Skywoman to the language of wild strawberries and squash, asters and goldenrod, algae and sweetgrass. Her collection of essays weaves together traditional ecological knowledge and scientific knowledge to examine the relationship people have, and can have, with the living environment. Kimmerer lives in New York where she is founder and director of the Centre for Native Peoples and the Environment. She talks about her book Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants with farmer and author James Rebanks.

Join Professor Susanna Lipscomb, chair of judges for the inaugural Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction, in conversation with Laura Cumming (Thunderclap) and Noreen Masud (A Flat Place), two of the writers shortlisted for the 2024 prize. They discuss their selected books, their broader themes and the importance of this new prize as a platform to elevate women’s voices in non-fiction that have previously been overlooked.

The winner of the 2024 Women's Prize for Non-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.

Three authors who share a personal history of displacement and violence discuss writing about their birth countries with lawyer and writer Philippe Sands. Pulitzer Prize winner Hisham Matar is an American-Libyan writer whose novel, My Friends, is about three friends in political exile and the emotional homeland that deep friendships can provide. Elif Shafak is a Turkish-British novelist, author of The Island of Missing Trees, shortlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction 2022, which follows a romantic relationship between a Greek and a Turkish Cypriot. Palestinian writer Adania Shibli is the author of PEN Translates Award-winning and International Booker Prize-longlisted Minor Detail, a meditation on war, violence and memory that dissects the Palestinian experience of dispossession and life under occupation.

Journey back in time 700 years with Honey & Co chefs Sarit Packer and Itamar Srulovich, as they explore connections between the food of medieval Moorish Spain and the recipes they have championed and popularised as two of the UK’s best-loved chefs. They draw on medieval recipes as revealed in the 13th century Andalusian manuscript Best of Delectable Foods and Dishes from al-Andalus and al-Maghrib: A Cookbook by Thirteenth-Century Andalusi Scholar Ibn Razīn al-Tujībī (1227–1293). Watch the couple demonstrate a recipe from the book, and try some delicious tastings.

Honey & Co’s cookbooks include Chasing Smoke: Cooking Over Fire around the Levant and Food from the Middle East. Packer and Srulovich talk to Polly Russell, a food historian and curator at the British Library.

Travel between the Rocky Mountains and Trinidad with authors Kevin Barry and Ingrid Persaud, who discuss their new novels with critic Alex Clark. Barry’s The Heart in Winter is about Tom Rourke, a young poet and a degenerate in Montana in the late 1800s. When Polly Gillespie arrives as the new bride of the devout mine captain, Tom falls in love with her and they ride into the sunset, but a posse of deranged Cornish gunsmen is soon in hot pursuit. Persaud's The Lost Love Songs of Boysie Singh is the tale of four women, connected and controlled by one man: the notorious, charismatic gangster Boysie Singh.

The world’s human population acquires two thirds of its calories from just three crops, each with one harvest in each hemisphere. With a burgeoning population, cities spreading onto productive agricultural land and climate change, the area we have for producing food is steadily declining. So where will we grow our food and what will it look like? Will we go vegan or produce all our food organically?

Agronomist Jonathon Harrington (Cardiff University) leads a discussion with three world authorities, Professor Tina Barsby (University of Cambridge), Professor Denis Murphy (University of South Wales), and International Agricultural Economist Graham Brookes, on this essential subject. Join the experts to hear the scale of the issues and then come together to workshop some solutions.

Ivor Novello Award nominated songwriter and international reggae artist shares his insights into writing global hits including Boom Shak-A-Lak and Arranged Marriage.