Hay Festival 2024

Ever since he was a child, kicking broken footballs on the streets of East London in the shadow of Canary Wharf’s skyscrapers, Gary Stevenson wanted something better.

Then he won a bank competition and a position as the youngest trader in the City, a place where you could make more money than you’d ever imagined and your colleagues are dysfunctional maths geniuses, overfed public schoolboys and borderline psychopaths yet start to feel like family. Stevenson talks about dealing in a trillion dollars a day, and how it felt as he realised the wealth of a few depended on millions becoming poorer and poorer.

The last few years have seen the world plunged into division and isolation, with a pandemic, multiple wars and the effects of climate change. In the face of these disasters, society is left yearning for both guidance and a place to shelter. Together, spiritual directors Marie-Elsa Bragg and Rowan Williams will interrogate what spiritual leadership looks like within the UK and globally during these fragmented times, and how we can engage in spiritual retreats in the modern world.

In Passions of the Soul, former Archbishop of Canterbury Williams looks at how the Eastern Christian tradition teaches us how to develop our self-knowledge and awareness, so that we can better relate to the world. In Sleeping Letters Bragg, a priest in the diocese of London and Duty Chaplain of Westminster Abbey, returns through prose and poetry to the night her mother died by suicide, when Bragg was just six.

Playwright and novelist Michael Frayn discusses the art of storytelling with his daughter, screenwriter and novelist Rebecca Frayn, in an event chaired by his grandson, producer and filmmaker Jack Harries. They discuss Michael Frayn’s memoir Among Others, Rebecca Frayn’s new novel Lost in Ibiza, and much more. Michael Frayn is best known for his dramas Noises Off, Copenhagen and Democracy. Rebecca Frayn is a documentary maker and screenwriter whose work includes Killing Me Softly and Misbehaviour. Harries is a documentary filmmaker and producer, co-founder of Earthrise Studio.

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

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.

In 1972, an eight-year-old Spencer was sent to boarding school for the first time. The Earl recounts the trauma of being sent away from home. His poignant memoir and account of social history A Very Private School offers a clear-eyed, first-hand account of a culture of cruelty at the school he attended and gives insights into an antiquated boarding system. Drawing on his contemporaries’ and his own memories, he reflects on the hopelessness and abandonment he felt, the intense pain of homesickness and the appalling sense of inescapability.

Educated at Eton College and Oxford, Spencer became a historian, broadcaster and author (his Blenheim: Battle for Europe was a Sunday Times bestseller). He harnesses his talent for historical analysis to explore the long-lasting impact of his experiences, sharing this candid reckoning with Reverend Richard Coles, with whom he co-hosts the Rabbit Hole Detectives podcast (alongside Dr Cat Jarman).

The journalist and humourist recounts some of the strangest, funniest and most hazardous adventures from his 25-year career: sneaking into Bohemian Grove with the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, getting chased by the shadowy Bilderberg Group, trying to spot psychopaths in the corridors of power, uncovering a secret unit of soldiers endeavouring to kill goats just by staring at them, and the horrors that ensued when he wrote the first book about what became known as ‘cancel culture’. Enjoy Ronson’s hair-raising, funny and sharp observations about the strange world we’ve created for ourselves.

Absorb the unexpected sounds of this genre-splicing supergroup, whose members are current UK Poet Laureate Simon Armitage, producer and multi-instrumentalist Patrick Pearson and musician Richard Walters. Their two critically acclaimed albums, Call In The Crash Team and The Ultraviolet Age, have garnered over five million streams, and their UK tours have included major festivals such as Green Man and Blu Dot. Specialising in collaborations with many different kinds of artists – in 2020 they released ‘Lockdown’ featuring actor Florence Pugh, to raise money for the charity Refuge, and in 2023 performed a commission in tandem with Easington Colliery Band in County Durham – their memorable style always takes songs, melodies and words for its foundation stones.