Hay Festival 2024

Learn about the biggest vanishing trick of all time with multi-award-winning author Frank Cottrell-Boyce. In Frank’s adventure mystery, The Wonder Brothers, Blackpool Tower has disappeared. Can two young magicians do the impossible and bring back the tower? Find out about magic, hear readings and get writing tips from the master of storytelling in this fun-filled event.

Join Sarah Coyle for a highly interactive event, specially created for Hay Festival, where you’ll embark on two adventures and decide what happens every step of the way. First, you’ll work together to find out why Tylwyth Teg the fairy is cross and causing all sorts of mischief at the Festival. Then you’ll help Zara, the star of Sarah’s latest book (Pick a Story: A Monster Princess Shark Adventure), to find her beloved Old Ted. But was he taken by a monster, pinched by a princess or snapped by a shark? You decide!

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.

Enjoy this half-hour open air performance between events. Got 2 Sing Choir perform uplifting songs from top of the charts to golden oldies, with plenty of fun and laughter.

With a career in fashion spanning nearly two decades Patrick Grant has a lot to say about our clothing, who makes it and how it’s made. Less: Stop Buying So Much Rubbish is a passionate and revealing book about loving clothes but despairing of a broken global system. Patrick explains the crisis of consumption and quality in fashion, and how we might make ourselves happier by rediscovering the joy of living with fewer, better quality things.

The 2014 Booker Prize winner (The Narrow Road to the Deep North) and 2002 Commonwealth Prize winner (Gould’s Book of Fish) discusses his new novel with the literary journalist. Beginning at a love hotel by Japan’s Inland Sea and ending by a river in Tasmania, Question 7 is about the choices we make about love and the chain reaction that follows. By way of HG Wells and Rebecca West’s affair through 1930s nuclear physics to Flanagan’s father working as a slave labourer near Hiroshima when the atom bomb is dropped, this daisy chain of events reaches fission when a young man finds himself trapped in a rapid on a wild river not knowing if he is to live or to die.

The British Museum houses more than 60,000 objects from the Americas but only a small percentage have ever been exhibited to the public. To analyse this extensive collection, Hay Festival and the Santo Domingo Centre of Excellence for Latin American Research at the British Museum commissioned six writers, including Selva Almada (Argentina), Philippe Sands (UK) and Juan Gabriel Vásquez (Colombia), with a specialist Museum team, to research the documents narrating how certain objects arrived at the institution.

These ranged from diaries, letters and sketches to reflections and transactions, all forming part of the process of acquisition and examination. Focusing on aspects of the archives that caught their attention, the six authors imagined their own narratives, whose protagonists are the adventurers, dreamers and thieves in the title of this anthology, published by Latin American specialists Charco Press.

Wildlife and ecosystems across the globe face enormous threats, but identifying conservation priorities and approaches poses many challenging questions. How do we balance the desire to protect threatened wildlife species with the needs of human populations? Who decides? Join a conversation between the Head of Aberystwyth University’s School of Veterinary Science, Professor Darrell Abernethy, and a representative from the World Wildlife Federation to explore how some of the world’s most treasured species are being impacted by human activities and natural crises.

Prize-winning novelist and short story writer Ingrid Persaud leads a workshop on developing your own unique voice through fiction. Your writer’s voice is something you will spend your entire life thinking about. It is your authentic signature and your writer’s personality; it is what makes your writing distinct and immediately recognisable. During this session you’ll develop your understanding of style, perspective and tone, leaving with a sense of how voice makes your work outstanding.

Kiri Pritchard-McLean dissects funny and fascinating medicine with experts and comedians.

Join Welsh poet Owen Sheers (The Green Hollow) to hear the lyrical story of a little boy and his two best friends. As they fly around the world on a magic rug, they find trouble on the dark sea. Can they find what they need to return home?

Enjoy this half-hour open air performance between events. Got 2 Sing Choir perform uplifting songs from top of the charts to golden oldies, with plenty of fun and laughter.

Daniel Clement has suffered a secret humiliation and to recover, takes respite at the monastery where he was a novice. But there are tensions building there, too, as the dark past of novice master Father Paul emerges, and a murder ensues. Meanwhile back at the village of Champton, Daniel is the subject of gossip, his mother Audrey is up to something again, there's trouble at the dress shop, and the puppies are running riot. The Anglican priest who co-presented Saturday Live on BBC Radio 4 for 11 years and has won Celebrity Mastermind twice discusses the third book in his Canon Clement Mystery series with radiohost Natasha Knight.

The British Empire is a subject of both shame and glorification. Journalist Sathnam Sanghera talks to historian David Olusoga about how our imperial past is everywhere: from how we live and think to the foundation of the NHS and even our response to the Covid-19 crisis. Sanghera is author of Empireland and most recently Empireworld, a look at how British imperialism has shaped the world. Olusoga’s latest book is Black History for Every Day of the Year.

How can humans divert from ecological destruction and climate breakdown to ensure an environment in which all life can flourish? Ethicist Melanie Challenger, deputy co-chair of the Nuffield Council on Bioethics and vice president of the RSPCA, has some of the answers. She discusses the meaning of animal dignity, and how contributors to the essay collection Animal Dignity offer interpretations rooted in science, conservation and agriculture, as well as morality, philosophy and the personal.

Jones and Murray discuss their memoirs, both captivating accounts of unusual lives in late twentieth century Britain, in which celebrities pop up regularly. Jones grew up in 1970s London, spending the next decade building a glittering career as a newspaper editor leading up to his multi-award-winning tenure at GQ. In These Foolish Things he reflects on how he sought to stir up music, politics and fashion. In My Family and Other Rock Stars, Murray recounts a freewheeling whirlwind of a childhood in the late 1970s, living with her mum, a Cordon Bleu chef, at the iconic recording studio Rockfield. At this place of legend, where some of the most famous rock albums of all time were recorded, the chances of bumping into Freddie Mercury or David Bowie were as normal as hopscotch and homework.

Celebrate the ways in which storytelling can tackle the climate crisis with the official launch of the Climate Fiction Prize. The Prize aims to showcase novels of powerful literary merit and to solidify climate fiction as a genre in its own right, as well as inspire new narratives. In the prize’s inaugural year, judges Nicola Chester (author of On Gallows Down), Andy Fryers (Hay Festival Sustainability Director) and Tori Tsui (climate justice activist and writer) speak to writer and journalist Madeleine Bunting, the Chair of Judges. Their discussion explores the ways in which fiction enables society to comprehend the impacts of climate change and manifest responses to combat apathy and doomism. The Prize is supported by Climate Spring, an organisation using the power of storytelling to change the narrative on the climate crisis.

Jon Ronson is back with another season of jaw dropping, unexpected human stories from the history of the culture wars.

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.

Ever outspoken, controversial and spectacularly entertaining, Britain’s naughtiest actor and the author of This Much is True returns with more juicy, jaw-dropping stories from her eventful life and career. Join us on another unforgettable adventure through the extraordinary life and strong opinions of Miriam Margolyes.

“My new book is called Oh Miriam! – something that has been said to me a lot over the years, often in tones of strong disapproval. It contains lots more revelations and stories and discoveries and I can’t wait to share it with you all!” From being escorted off the Today programme (for saying what we were all thinking) to declaring her love to Vanessa Redgrave; from Tales of the Unexpected to Graham Norton’s sofa, she is our most loved and most outspoken national treasure. Oh Miriam! Stories from an Extraordinary Life takes you inside both her head and her heart. Buckle up for the most irrepressible, hilarious and moving event as she tells all to lawyer and writer Philippe Sands.