Hay Festival 2025 Full Programme

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.

Marcel Lucont (Comedy Central at the Comedy Store, Sky Atlantic’s Set List, BBC1’s John Bishop Show) presents a feast of international cabaret, coming to Hay Festival for one night only! Cabaret Fantastique has no fixed abode – a cult hit at festivals worldwide, each programme of entertainment is handpicked by Marcel. You’ll be served up a luscious plate of the finest performers from the world of cabaret, comedy, circus, poetry, magic and music, all held together with dry wit and a dry white.

The show has been a sell-out success at Soho’s Crazy Coqs for the past seven years, featuring a different line-up each night, and has been staged at London Wonderground and Glastonbury Festival among others. “Debaucherous, delightful and debonair, Marcel Lucont knows how to put on one hell of a show” PerthNow, Fringe World Festival.

The UK’s most apologetically posh comedian shares a deep dive into the various facepalms of his recent past, and a live diary of his unravelling present.

After coming last by quite a distance on Taskmaster Series 15, and seeing his emotional frailties laid bare in a series of memes of him with his head in his hands, Ivo Graham is adapting to an increasingly irreversible reputation as a man better known for his chaos than his comedy.

Longer-term resolutions of rest and relaxation can wait; in the meantime he’s trying to host the greatest club night of all time, run a Sub-3 marathon while pushing a wheelchair, and put his heart on the line in a show unlike anything he’s ever done before. Can these dreams become a reality, or will they just become more yardsticks for failure?