Welcome to our 2024 Hay Festival Winter Weekend Programme.
If you are unable to attend in person, don't worry, you can buy an online pass for front row access from the comfort of your own home. You can also pre-order signed copies of the books for this year's events or visit the Winter Weekend online bookshop for unsigned copies.
In Yoruba culture, newborn babies are welcomed into the world, and ushered into the social fabric, through naming ceremonies filled with songs of praise. The names bestowed communicate where the baby has come from – the circumstances of its birth, the atmosphere in the home – and where its future will take it. Join poet Theresa Lola as she shares poems from her second collection, Ceremony for the Nameless, and discusses the act of naming and how it shapes us. Asking questions about the realities of being both Nigerian and British, tracing the lineages of names, and considering why some people deserve to be named while others are treated as though invisible, Lola conjures up a world of words conveying the diasporic experience.
Lola is a poet and writer from South London. She served as the Young People’s Laureate for London from 2019-20, and her poem ‘Equilibrium’ was added to OCR’s GCSE English Literature syllabus in 2022. Lola was featured in the ‘Forces for Change’ issue of British Vogue as a next generation talent.
Experience a remarkable audio journey by heading deep into an undersea world, all from the comfort of St Mary’s Church. Wildlife filmmaker and writer Tom Mustill and musician and Human Instruments co-founder Vahakn Matossian present a soundscape of recordings from a ground-breaking underwater listening station, three miles beneath the waves of Monterey Bay Canyon.
There, underwater landslides rumble and distant rain at the surface can still be heard as a fizz, and the seas teem with the sounds of dolphin megapods, hunting killer whales, the bleats of Gray whale calves to their mothers, the mysterious booms of Fin and Whales and of course, the complex and enchanting songs of the Humpback Whale. Mustill’s team spent six months gathering 350 new bioacoustic tracks from scientists around the world, many never heard before, making them into a soundscape journey from the perspective of seven different whales.