Families

Get your Hay day off to a brilliant start with our daily Ready, Steady, Music workshops! With different activities each day, these interactive, fun-filled sessions for mini musicians and their grown-ups will have you tapping sticks, roaring like dinosaurs, flying with unicorns, dancing with scarves, playing with parachutes and so much more. Come and meet our puppets, explore our range of instruments and listen to the beautiful sound of the cello.

Captivating young imaginations and creating lasting memories, these sessions offer a unique musical adventure. The perfect way to boost wellbeing, increase confidence, spark creativity and introduce children to the joy of music.

An opportunity to get crafting! Activities differ every day, including everything from print-making to junk modelling with recycled materials. Get messy and creative in these interactive sessions delivered by artists and discover that your imagination is the only 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.

Dairy-free and gluten-free options available.

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.

Dairy-free and gluten-free options available.

Strap in for the launch of Cressida Cowell’s How to Train your Dragon School: Doom of the Darkwing, her first novel in the Dragon world for 10 years. This new series follows Hiccup Horrendous Haddock the Third, and his dragons Toothless and Windwalker, who have joined the Viking and Dragon Training School on the Isle of Berk, to learn how to be great barbarians and dragon sidekicks. And before they know it, they are bottom in pretty much everything… These new standalone adventures are action-packed and perfect for developing readers.

Please bring your own sketchbook and pencils to this event.

We present the winning authors and illustrators of the 2025 IBC Awards in this interactive family storytelling event. IBC (Inclusive Books for Children) is a charity with a free website for families, schools and libraries to help easily choose books for a more inclusive bookshelf. Showcasing stories that represent all types of family, they feature books with a variety of ethnicities, positive images of disabilities and different identities.

The annual IBC Awards celebrate the talent behind the best new inclusive children’s books published in the UK across three categories: baby and toddler books (1–3 years), picture books (3–7 years) and highly illustrated children’s fiction (5–9 years).

The Festival bookshop features a dedicated Inclusive Books for Children section showcasing IBC’s top-reviewed books of the year. Come along and get your books signed after the event!

Learn the basics of juggling and object manipulation in this workshop with expert tutors from Deviate Creative. You can continue to practise these skills and improve on your own at home. Try out hula hooping, diablo and more, in true Big Top style.

An opportunity to get crafting! Activities differ every day, including everything from print-making to junk modelling with recycled materials. Get messy and creative in these interactive sessions delivered by artists and discover that your imagination is the only 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.

Following the success of last year’s production at Hay Festival, we’re thrilled to present a delightful 30-minute, family-friendly adaptation of As You Like It by William Shakespeare, directed by award-winning writer and director Greg Banks. Performed by Hereford College of Arts Performing Arts degree students, this lively rendition of the classic comedy is filled with love, laughter and unforgettable characters.

Clown around with the sensational Tweedy the Clown, who’ll bring the magic of the circus to life with his antics.

Tweedy’s new laugh-out-loud picture book adventure is Tweedy: The Clown Who Lost His Nose, illustrated by Daniel Duncan, in which Tweedy causes chaos as he tries to chase after his lost nose.

Join award-winning author and illustrator Owen Davey as he introduces us to his incredible new book Zoom Out, which is all about animals and their incredible ecosystems. Owen will be showcasing how to draw some of your favourite animals, alongside a conversation with the World Wildlife Fund about the importance of conservation.

In the book, Owen shows the role that each animal plays in its ecosystem, helping us understand that animals aren’t just valuable in their own right – they’re also part of a wider natural environment. Owen has worked with WWF, Lego and National Geographic, among others.

Please bring your own sketchbook and pencils to this event.

Learn the basics of juggling and object manipulation in this workshop with expert tutors from Deviate Creative. You can continue to practise these skills and improve on your own at home. Try out hula hooping, diablo and more, in true Big Top style.

Two acclaimed Welsh authors discuss their work with the National Poet of Wales. Claire’s Welsh Giants, Ghosts & Goblins was Waterstones Welsh Book of the Year 2024. She mixes stories from all parts of Wales, reimagined through her own, idiosyncratic lens, with the character of Idris the Giant weaving them together.

Manon’s The Blue Book of Nebo explores the aftermath of a worldwide catastrophe through the eyes of a small nuclear family in a remote village in near-future Wales. Manon has won Wales Book of the Year as well as being four-times winner of the Tir na N’Og Welsh children’s literature award.

Jenny Valentine has been thinking about lists. Long lists, short lists, shopping lists, wish lists, missing lists, to-do lists. Everybody writes them, one way or another. Our lists say more about us than we realise. And they can be very helpful when you are writing a story!

Come and make some lists with Jenny about everyday things or life and death things. Jenny will introduce you to her latest YA novel, Us in the Before and After, a tear-jerking, heartbreakingly beautiful read about the fallout of a sudden death and the lifelong consequences of a single tragic act.

Learn the basics of juggling and object manipulation in this workshop with expert tutors from Deviate Creative. You can continue to practise these skills and improve on your own at home. Try out hula hooping, diablo and more, in true Big Top style.

An opportunity to get crafting! Activities differ every day, including everything from print-making to junk modelling with recycled materials. Get messy and creative in these interactive sessions delivered by artists and discover that your imagination is the only 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.

Clara Kumagai burst on the YA scene last year with the popular Catfish Rolling, a 2024 Yoto Carnegie Medal nominee. Now she’s back, with restless ghosts to be appeased in her new novel, inspired by Puccini’s Madame Butterfly. When Japanese-American teenager Adam discovers a diary in his attic, he is enthralled by its account of a young Japanese woman’s life. A hundred years separate them yet she, like Adam, is caught between cultures, relationships and heartbreak. She also writes of the ghosts that have begun to seek her out, which Adam dismisses as fantasy – until he too, begins to be haunted. It leads him to Nagasaki, trying to solve the mystery of the diary, and his own identity. And the ghosts gather…

Please bring your own notebook and pen to this event.

Learn the basics of juggling and object manipulation in this workshop with expert tutors from Deviate Creative. You can continue to practise these skills and improve on your own at home. Try out hula hooping, diablo and more, in true Big Top style.

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.

Dairy-free and gluten-free options available.

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.

Dairy-free and gluten-free options available.

Ever wondered what donuts get up to when they’re not being eaten? No, because that would be silly! But it turns out, donuts have BIG PLANS FOR WORLD DOMINATION! Meet Sprinkles, the leader of the Squad; Jammyboi, who spreads stickiness everywhere; and Spronky, who is bizarrely unconventional. But don’t mention the arch-nemeses of the donuts… the bagels, secretly plotting Donut Squad’s doom!

Cartoonist and writer Neill is creator of the award-winning Mega Robo Bros series and How to Make Awesome Comics. Guffaws are guaranteed in this event about his super sweet and scrumptiously silly new graphic novel – perfect for lovers of Bunny vs Monkey and Dog Man.

Please bring your own sketchbook and pencils to this event.

Get your Hay day off to a brilliant start with our daily Ready, Steady, Music workshops! With different activities each day, these interactive, fun-filled sessions for mini musicians and their grown-ups will have you tapping sticks, roaring like dinosaurs, flying with unicorns, dancing with scarves, playing with parachutes and so much more. Come and meet our puppets, explore our range of instruments and listen to the beautiful sound of the cello.

Captivating young imaginations and creating lasting memories, these sessions offer a unique musical adventure. The perfect way to boost wellbeing, increase confidence, spark creativity and introduce children to the joy of music.

An opportunity to get crafting! Activities differ every day, including everything from print-making to junk modelling with recycled materials. Get messy and creative in these interactive sessions delivered by artists and discover that your imagination is the only 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.

Dairy-free and gluten-free options available.

Draw your sabre and take on friends and family for the Hay Festival fencing crown in this have-a-go session with Fencing Cymru/Welsh Fencing. Learn the skills of this fast-paced Olympic sport in a safe and friendly environment before stepping onto the piste – en garde!

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.

Dairy-free and gluten-free options available.

Take a deep dive into the story of information with author and illustrator Chris Haughton (A Bit Lost). His latest work is a graphic handbook to the biggest influence on human history.

Exploring the ways humans share and store information, and how this has shaped and changed the world, we travel through time from the first languages and cave paintings to how we communicate and record information today. With illustrations in his signature style, Chris shows us everything we know and how we know it!

Please bring your own sketchbook and pencils to this event.

Kes Gray eats Ideaflakes for breakfast, spreads silliness on his toast and loves to write books that will make children laugh out loud. Come and join him in this hilarious interactive event where he’ll be reading from the latest Oi book, Oi Dinosaurs!, and sharing lots of dinosaur jokes.

According to Frog, in dinosaur times sitting down hadn’t been invented. So . . . Pterosaurs didn’t sit on bendy straws? Velociraptors didn’t sit on plug adaptors? And Triceratops didn’t sit on lollipops? Frog, Cat and Dog bring us oodles of prehistoric rhyming fun packed with dinosaurs, mammoths and – of course – prehistoric frogs! This event is guaranteed to get little dinosaur fans giggling.

Children’s author and vet Gill Lewis shares her new inspiring tale of wildlife adventure and conservation. A camping trip to count puffins on Devil Bird Island turns into a real adventure for friends Tia and Nat. First, they have to rescue a mysterious marine animal caught in a fishing net and swept very far from home. Then, when it gets dark, they hear strange wailing and something white and ghostly flies at their tent. Safely back home, they unravel the mysteries of the previous night and learn some important lessons about how everyone on the planet needs to look out for the wildlife around them.

Reena from Bollywood Dreams Dance Company will teach you some dynamic moves in this fun Bollywood dance workshop. You’ll learn hand gestures, some technique work and choreography. By the end of the session you’ll have formed a fun Bollywood routine to take away and show your friends!

An opportunity to get crafting! Activities differ every day, including everything from print-making to junk modelling with recycled materials. Get messy and creative in these interactive sessions delivered by artists and discover that your imagination is the only 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.

Join the Paralympic champion, Strictly Come Dancing star and You Can Do Anything! author for an empowering and inspirational discussion with former Paralympic athlete Baroness Tanni Grey-Thompson about finding your happiness, chasing your dreams and being unstoppable. Jonnie will take us on a journey to get inspired, build confidence, overcome setbacks and learn that we can achieve anything, no matter what our abilities or ambitions might be.

A double Paralympic 100-metre sprint champion, Jonnie won gold and set the Paralympic record at the age of 19 at the London 2012 Olympics, going on to win gold again, and smash his own record at the Rio Paralympics in 2016. He was the first disabled contestant to compete on Strictly Come Dancing and is passionate about challenging and changing other people’s perceptions around disability.