Hay Festival Winter Weekend 2024

The UK is lauded internationally for its vibrant art scene, from its literature to its acting and visual arts. Engagement is at an all-time high, and it’s clear that exposure to arts leads to healthier happier adults.

And yet it’s been a turbulent year in the world of arts funding, and access to the arts at a young age is uneven, often depending on geography and wealth. A systematic dismantling of arts in education over the last two decades coupled with a sharp decrease in the levels of funding has left us with a debate about the future of arts in the UK: can we enter a new age of creativity, and what does our future relationship with the arts look like?

Join BBC News Culture & Media Editor, Katie Razzall as she talks to Hay Festival CEO Julie Finch, Tate director Maria Balshaw and Sir Chris Bryant MP, Minister of State for Creative Industries, Arts and Tourism, who share their opinions on one of the most crucial debates of our time.

There will be a collection after the event for Hay Festival Foundation

Grand Designs is one of the most popular lifestyle shows on television, celebrating its 25th anniversary this year. Join presenter Kevin McCloud as he discusses the impact the show has had on domestic architecture and design, and talks about some of the most impressive and game-changing self-build projects from the last 25 years.

McCloud is best known for the internationally acclaimed, Bafta award-winning series Grand Designs. It is now shown around the world along with spin-off series including Grand Designs: The Street and Grand Designs: House of the Year. He has also written several books on design and champions sustainable development, context, the historic environment, and ecological construction. He was awarded an MBE in 2014 for his services to architecture.
In conversation with BBC News Culture & Media Editor, Katie Razzall.

The winter months don’t mean an outdoor space can’t be a source of comfort and solace, as Caroline Quentin argues in this event. The actress, drawing on her life-long passion for gardening, talks to Tamsin Westhorpe about the joy she gets from spending time in her garden, whether she’s grappling with the best way to grow plants and vegetables or raising seeds in her potting shed.

Quentin shares stories from her lifetime of gardening – from thieving blackbirds to singing to dragonflies – and shares tips and tricks that can be used all year round. Known for her roles in TV shows including Men Behaving Badly, Bridgerton and Jonathan Creek, Quentin is the author of Drawn to the Garden, a collection of stories, advice, recipes and poems about her love for gardening. Westhorpe is the editor of the Horticultural Trade Association magazine and curator and gardener of Stockton Bury Gardens, Herefordshire.

In this intimate event, actor Luke Evans takes us from his humble beginnings in a quaint Welsh mining village to the dazzling lights of Hollywood, where he starred in some of the biggest films of recent years. Evans grew up in the Rhymney Valley, south Wales, in a Jehovah’s Witness family. He felt different from an early age, and as he came to terms with his sexuality, he faced a difficult and uncertain path that he knew could lead him away from his community.

With tenderness and courage, Evans shares how he decided to leave his home and his religion aged just 17, and gives a behind-the-scenes glimpse of his stage and screen career.

Evans has told his full story in his memoir Boy From the Valleys: My Unexpected Journey, which recounts in detail how he discovered his passion for singing, acting and performing. Starring first in the West End in productions including Miss Saigon, Avenue Q and Rent, he went on to secure roles in blockbuster films such as The Hobbit, Beauty and the Beast and Fast and Furious. He has also released music and recently starred in Echo 3 on Apple TV+. Evans is in conversation with Welsh broadcaster, media personality, and writer Carol Vorderman.

Gifted organist and composer Father Richard Williams, former vicar of St Mary’s Church in Hay, performs a stunning live accompaniment to Fritz Lang’s classic 1927 silent film Metropolis, playing the outstanding Bevington organ. Metropolis is an early science fiction film which presents a highly stylised futuristic city where a cultured Utopian society exists above a bleak underworld populated by mistreated workers.

Get ready for an evening of laughter with comedian Jenny Eclair, as she tells the story of how she elbowed her way into the male-dominated world of 1980s stand-up. Born little Jenny Hargreaves to Major Derek Hargreaves (maybe a spy, maybe not) and June Hargreaves, Eclair went on to become one of the UK’s most successful comedians. She shares tales of drama school, punk poetry and not really having a clue about anything, and gives an insight into the changing face of women in comedy. Whether she’s discussing the frivolous or the serious, Eclair does so with a sharp insight and, of course, a big helping of humour.

Eclair was the first woman to win the UK’s top comedy award, the Perrier Award. Since then, she has taken multiple shows on tour around the country, most recently Sixty! (FFS) which was extended twice due to its popularity. Eclair is also an actress, and is known for her starring role on BBC1’s Grumpy Old Women, which ran for three series and was then adapted into four live shows touring across the UK and Australia, all of which she co-wrote and starred in. She is the co-host of the Older and Wider podcast, and the critically acclaimed author of seven novels, a collection of short stories and a number of non-fiction books. Her latest book is Jokes, Jokes, Jokes: My Very Funny Memoir.

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.

Tucked into the Welsh valleys and encircled by silver birch and pine is the village of Cwmcysgod, a quiet and sleepy place. But all is not as it seems in Alex McCarthy’s novella The Unbroken Beauty of Rosalind Bone: there are simmering tensions in Cwmcysgod, where a unique cast of characters gives voice to their version of the truth, and of the story of Rosalind Bone. McCarthy introduces the world of Cwmcysgod and characters including 16-year-old Catrin Bone and her embittered and reclusive mother, Mary, whose sister disappeared from the village in a shroud of shame years before.

McCarthy was born in Cardiff and grew up in South Wales. An alumna of London Contemporary Dance School, she worked as a dancer and choreographer for a number of years on stage, TV and film. The Unbroken Beauty of Rosalind Bone won Wales Fiction Book of the Year 2024.

She talks to author and previous Wales Book of the Year winner Caryl Lewis.

Spend a raucous night out in the company of Jim and Nancy Moir, as they share their weird and wonderful adventures of tracking down birds so Jim can paint them. Under the name Vic Reeves, Jim is one of the UK’s best known and most successful comedians. But since leaving behind the comedy persona that made his name, Moir has spent his time focusing on a passion from childhood: birds, and creating beautiful paintings of them. Moir shares his excitement about painting birds with his wife Nancy, and the pair’s hit television show Painting Birds with Jim and Nancy Moir is about to be commissioned for its third series. Join the couple for this exclusive event as they give an insight into their adventures tracking down and painting birds of all kinds and tell stories about the lives of our feathered friends. Moir and Nancy speak to publisher John Mitchinson of Unbound, which has published Moir’s paintings in the books Birds and More Birds.

Moir is most famous for his work as Vic Reeves alongside Bob Mortimer, with TV shows including Vic Reeves Big Night Out, The Smell of Reeves & Mortimer, and the comedy quiz show Shooting Stars. He is also a successful artist and he exhibits regularly around the world.

Nancy is an actress and television presenter, best known for her roles in Love Actually, Catterick and Painting Birds with Jim and Nancy.

Be swept away by actor Rupert Everett’s first collection of short stories, which take readers from a chaotic and emotional funeral to Paris to an L.A. talent agency via a middle-aged Russian countess confronting sex and age in a Cotswold teashop. Everett speaks to author, comedian and classicist Natalie Haynes about The American No, discussing his inspirations and process, and diving into how the wealth of film and TV ideas he’s created over his career have fed into the collection.

Everett shot to fame with the film Another Country in 1984 and has been a hugely successful actor and writer for many years. His films include Napoleon, My Policeman, Adult Material, The Name of the Rose and Funny Woman. His stage work includes playing Oscar Wilde in David Hare’s The Judas Kiss, for which he won the WhatsOnStage Award for Best Actor in a Play and was nominated for an Olivier Award. His first memoir, Red Carpets and Other Banana Skins, was a Sunday Times bestseller and its sequel, Vanished Years, won the Sheridan Morley Prize for Biography. His film of Oscar Wilde’s last years, The Happy Prince, was released in 2018 to widespread acclaim.

Festival favourite Natalie Haynes returns with a fresh dose of mythological musings. From Artemis to Aphrodite and Hera to Hestia, the bestselling author of Pandora’s Jar and Stone Blind brings formidable Greek goddesses the attention they deserve. These goddesses are as mighty, revered and destructive as their male counterparts. Isn’t it time we looked beyond the columns of a ruined temple to the awesome power within? She talks to Hay Festival Director of Programmes and Engagement Helen Bagnall.