Hay Festival 2025 Full Programme

Start your day with an hour of movement and breathwork. Our daily yoga classes are brought to you by a collective of highly skilled practitioners, all local to Hay-on-Wye. Each practitioner has their own style, but whichever class you attend, you can expect a mindful, student-focused practice with clear cueing and functional sequencing. Blending movement, mantra, meditation and breathwork, the classes support detoxification and regeneration – physically, emotionally and spiritually.

Whether you need grounding and recharging before a busy day at the Festival, an opportunity to stretch and move your body, or simply an hour to focus on your breathing, these yoga classes are open and accessible to all. Practitioners will adapt to different levels of experience, providing options for deepening or softening within poses so that each student takes what they need from the practice. Beginners and experienced students are most welcome. Yoga mats are provided.

Please contact Clare Fry at hello@larchwoodstudio.com with any questions relating to these classes. As capacity is limited, we recommend booking in advance to avoid disappointment.

Please wear loose, comfortable clothing, and alert your practitioner at the start of class if you have any injuries.

Get the story of Alexei Navalny, the man who became the sole political threat to Vladimir Putin, directly from his wife Yulia Navalnaya. Russian opposition leader, anti-corruption campaigner and political prisoner, Navalny won international recognition and respect. His many international honours included the Sakharov Prize, the European Parliament’s annual human rights prize.

In this extraordinary event, Navalnaya speaks to political strategist Alastair Campbell about her husband’s life and political fight, and his book Patriot, which he began writing after he was poisoned by the Russian security services in 2020. Patriot also contains Navalny’s prison diaries, written before his 2024 death in a brutal Siberian prison.

Gain a unique and heartfelt insight into the healing nature of our relationship with animals from Jay Griffiths, author of Wild: An Elemental Journey, Kith: The Riddle of the Childscape and Pip Pip: A Sideways Look at Time.

She discusses the evidence showing that animals can heal us, drawing on Indigenous knowledge, scientific discoveries and history to explore how animals can have a role in every level of healing, from the individual to the collective.

In conversation with writer, editor and producer Kathryn Tann, Griffiths tells stories from her new book How Animals Heal Us, including that of a pot-bellied pig who saved her owner’s life, and lions who guarded a girl from kidnappers.

Local historian Elizabeth Bingham and Hay resident Mary Morgan return to the Festival following previous years’ popular talks on local churches, castles, monuments and memorials. This year they turn to the history and workings of watermills, the world’s first source of mechanical power.

They take an illustrated look at some of the old mills near Hay, previously used for grinding grain, to give flour for bread and grist for animals, as well as for fulling cloth and making paper. Some are still working, some are ruined, and some have been restored or converted into homes, cafés or hydro-generating projects.

Is the myth that there is no Welsh art really true? Peter Lord doesn’t think so, and in a new exhibition at the National Library of Wales he’s combined his substantial collection with items from the National Art Collection at the National Library of Wales for the first time in order to tell the story of Welsh art and artists.

Lord punches back at the allegation made by Dr Llewelyn Wyn Griffith in the 1950s that there is no Welsh art, and talks through some of his collection of art and artefacts.

Lord worked for 15 years as a practising artist, and in 1986 turned to writing about Welsh art history. He has published extensively in both English and Welsh languages, broadcast on television and radio, and curated many exhibitions. His books include The Visual Culture of Wales and The Tradition.

The anthropologist and broadcaster sheds fresh light on how people have lived in Britain, by examining the stories of the dead. Her three books on burial, Ancestors, Buried and Crypt, revive characters from the past, starting with the earliest Britons and journeying through the Roman occupation and on to the Middle Ages.

From the murky world of prehistory to Roman graveside feasts, and from richly furnished Anglo Saxon graves to a pit of murdered Vikings, she shows that the information we can extract from archaeological human remains represents an essential tool for understanding our own history.

Professor Alice Roberts was a presenter on Channel 4’s Time Team, and went on to write and present The Incredible Human Journey, Origins of Us and Ice Age Giants on BBC2. She is also presenter of Digging for Britain.

Artists and activists Led By Donkeys share the journey of their five years of resistance against those in power in Britain.

Led By Donkeys was founded in early 2019 when four friends, motivated by the “thermonuclear hypocrisy of our political overlords”, started going out at night to paste up guerrilla billboards of the leading Brexiters’ historic tweets. Mixing art and activism, they have created some of the most memorable images of our political age, and continue to protest. Hear directly from the group, and be inspired to take your own political action. They talk to writer Oliver Bullough.

Joanne Harris returns to the world of Chocolat with the long-awaited story of Vianne. Twenty-five years after the publication of the Whitbread-shortlisted novel – adapted for film starring Juliette Binoche and Johnny Depp – the author discusses her prequel, set six years before Vianne opens her scandalous chocolaterie in the small French village of Lansquenet.

Sylviane Rochas scatters her mother’s ashes in New York and lets the changing wind blow her to the French seaside town of Marseille. For the first time in her life, Vianne holds the future in her own hands. As she discovers the joy of cooking for the first time, making recipes her own with the addition of bittersweet spices, she realises that it possesses its own, dangerous magic in this town full of secrets…

If you think the outlook is bleak, come and hear some much-needed new perspective on our prospects as Isabel Losada and Sumit Paul-Choudhury discuss their good vibes with Director of Positive News Martin Wright.

In The Joyful Environmentalist Losada gets right on with the solutions. Looking for every single way we can take care of the planet, she addresses how we live and work, travel, shop, eat, drink, dress, vote, play, volunteer, bank – everything. She advocates doing this wholeheartedly, energetically and joyfully, until we’re all fully equipped to be part of the pollution solution.

Astrophysicist-turned-journalist Sumit Paul-Choudhury’s The Bright Side is a deep dive into the power and science of optimism. Irrational though it might seem, optimism is central to the human psyche: without it we would never have survived the unpredictable and often hostile world we evolved into – and it may have lessons for us yet.

Join our celebrated pizzaioli for an entertaining, hands-on workshop that will teach you everything that you knead to know about how to make pizzas. Since nothing complements pizza quite like a perfect glass of wine, let us pair and enjoy Italian wine together with your pizza creations.

This 90-minute session includes snacks, a 12” pizza of your own creation and complementary wine throughout. Dairy-free and gluten-free options available.

Mark Watson is generally accepted to be alive. And yet he’s died many times. Not just on stage – though he’ll tell you about that – but in other ways, too. There’s been the death of a childhood dream. The death of his panel-show career. And then there was the time he died inside and nearly lost it all…

Revealing and painfully funny, Mark will tell us all about mortification, failure and the times life doesn’t work out as planned. But he also wisely questions whether the things we strive for – recognition, success, the approval of others – are really the things that matter. He might be talking about death, but he reminds us how to live.

In this year marking the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the last concentration camps, renowned historian Sir Simon Schama confronts the history of the Holocaust as not just a Nazi obsession, but as a European-wide crime.

For his recent BBC documentary The Holocaust, 80 Years On, Schama visited mass killing sites in Lithuania, the home of his mother’s family. He travelled to the Netherlands, famed for its long history of tolerance, and where he lived and worked as a young historian, to answer the question of why fewer Jews survived here than in any other Western occupied country.

At every step Schama leans into remarkable acts of resistance, the compulsion of ordinary Jews to document the unprecedented atrocities that were happening to them, in the hope they could never be denied. Showing clips and recounting the making of the documentary, he considers how the catastrophe has been represented on screen since the end of the war itself, and asks profound questions about what the Holocaust means now.

Austrian film director GW Pabst was one of the greatest directors of his era, but when the Nazis seized power he found himself forced to return to Germany, despite plans to emigrate to America. Daniel Kehlmann’s new novel The Director fictionalises the story of Pabst, who made two films under Josef Goebbels, the minister of propaganda in Berlin.

Kehlmann talks to journalist Misha Glenny about The Director, what literature is capable of, and writing about art, power and barbarism. Kehlmann’s novel Tyll was shortlisted for the 2020 International Booker Prize, and Measuring the World has been translated into over 14 languages.

An evening of traditional music and song from one of the most prolific performers and recording artists on the English folk scene. John Kirkpatrick is a singer and instrumentalist who has played in various bands, and is currently in Kirkophany, where he plays with his four sons.

In 1975 Kirkpatrick started the first group to concentrate exclusively on the Morris dances of the Welsh Border. With a radically different approach to the dancing, the Shropshire Bedlams caused quite a revolution in the Morris world, and nearly 50 years later, Kirkpatrick is still dancing and driving the team onwards.

In this live concert, he fills the room with an irresistibly joyful noise, topping his sparkling squeezebox playing with lusty vocals, all presented with lashings of wit and humour.

Get your groove on with British soul and R&B legend Billy Ocean as he performs all his greatest hits and fan favourites. Ocean is one of the biggest recording stars Britain has ever produced, and has just released his 40th anniversary album, Suddenly.

Born in Trinidad and moving to London’s East End when he was just seven, Ocean has sold more than 30 million records and won awards including a Grammy and an Ivor Novello. In 2020 he was made an MBE for services to music.

There’s no show like a Jason Byrne No Show. No Show is a show with no comedy safety net. By the end of No Show you’ll have experienced a once in a lifetime show or No Show. Jason, along with the audience, will begin No Show with no show whatsoever. Witness Jason use his infamous audience interactions with a sprinkle of props, both on and off the stage, to create No Show!

The biggest selling comedian at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, Jason’s inspired, original brand of high-energy intelligent lunacy ensures that there is no other comedian like him, and his sell-out shows have attracted accolades including the Perrier Newcomer Award Nomination and the Perrier Award Nomination. His television work includes Live at the Apollo (BBC One), Comedy Annual (ITV1) and The Channel 4 Comedy Gala (Channel 4).

Activist Kate Wilson took on the Metropolitan Police for breaching her human rights – and won. Wilson had a one-year romance with a man named Mark Stone in 2003, but years later discovered he was a married police officer, and part of a unit that infiltrated environmental groups, forming sexual relationships and spying without warrant on hundreds of innocent civilians. Hear Wilson talk to writer Oliver Bullough about how it took her nearly 20 years to uncover the eerie truth about Britain’s secret political police, and why her story and fight matter.

What’s in a name? And can a name change the course of your life? It can in Florence Knapp’s debut novel The Names, which spans 35 years and follows three alternate versions of protagonist Cora’s life after she visits the registrar and names her infant son. The Names looks at the ripple effects of domestic abuse, the ties of family and what it means to heal.

Knapp talks to Chocolat author Joanne Harris about the inspiration for her debut novel, the process of writing it and how she came up with three versions of Cora’s life.

Join author Caroline O’Donoghue at Hay Festival as she hosts a live episode of her award-winning podcast Sentimental Garbage – a show that dives deep into the pop culture we love. The podcast celebrates the stories that women create, which are often undervalued, and has featured episodes about Nora Ephron, the high-street, cult-classic films and everything in between.

Bring your most beloved trash topics, the guilty pleasures you’re dying to see dissected, and O’Donoghue and a special guest will pick them apart live on stage. No topic too messy, no pleasure too guilty.

With over 11 million downloads worldwide, Sentimental Garbage has been called “exceptionally perceptive and funny” (The Times) and “full of humour, pace and sharp analysis” (The Irish Times). In its own words, Sentimental Garbage is a podcast not about knowing the most, but feeling the most.