Hay Festival 2025 Full Programme

Start your day with an hour of kundalini yoga – the oldest and most transformative yoga practice. Blending physical postures, breathing techniques, meditation and mantra to awaken our life force energy located at the base of the spine, it opens us up to reach our highest potential. This unique yoga style offers profound benefits across the physical, emotional and spiritual realms. In this special class, Lucy offers a dynamic medley of the kundalini practices, designed to leave you feeling both grounded and energised, with a profound sense of peace and overall wellness as you rejoin the hum of the Festival.

Lucy Teear is a kundalini yoga teacher, plant-based nutritionist and health coach with a powerful story of transformation, following two aggressive breast cancer diagnoses in 2010 and 2016. She teaches kundalini yoga workshops at Larchwood Studios in Hay-on-Wye and runs health and yoga retreats around the world.

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.

Start your day the right way with online sensation Shaolin Master Shi Heng Yi, who has inspired millions to develop daily practices for body and mind, blending martial arts with Buddhist practices.

Shi Heng Yi’s parents (Laotian immigrants to Germany) enrolled him into Shaolin Kung Fu aged four knowing it would cultivate in him a strength of mind. As an adult, he returned to the teachings and began to develop a Shaolin school for modern living. He founded the Shaolin Temple Europe, a Buddhist community in Germany.

Join Shi Heng Yi as he talk to writer and education specialist Lamorna Ash about how to develop a strong mindset and body, and shares some of the exercises that will help you find balance and energy. Shi Heng Yi’s TED Talk on five hindrances to self-mastery has been watched over 17 million times.

Start the day at Hay Festival with headline guests chaired by editors from The Independent reviewing the news, discussing the headlines and issues of the day, and revealing what’s breaking and trending online. A fascinating look at what’s tickling the nation’s fancy – and driving it to splenetic fury. Bring your coffee! Among today’s guests is Friederike Otto, Senior Lecturer in Climate Science at Grantham Institute, Imperial College London.

In today’s polarised and polarising world, we need to zoom into the processes happening inside each of us. Why do some people become radicalised? Who is most susceptible to ideological thinking? Can we unchain our minds from toxic dogmas? Dr Leor Zmigrod is a pioneer in the field of ‘political neuroscience’, and drawing on her groundbreaking research she uncovers the hidden mechanisms driving our beliefs and behaviours.

Learn more about our political beliefs and ideologies – not transient thoughts in our minds, divorced from our bodies, but actually changing our neural architecture, our cells. Find out about rigid thinking in ourselves and others, and how to recognise our ability to resist irrational rules and authority. Regardless of your political stance, Zmigrod will challenge you to reassess your convictions – and what they are doing to your brain.

Playwright Suzie Miller introduces Prima Facie, her book about a brilliant defence barrister at the top of her game who realises the rules might not be in her favour after a date goes wrong.

Miller’s book, an international runaway success, is based on her award-winning play of the same name, which starred Jodie Comer as barrister Tessa Ensler. The play itself led to changes in the legal profession regarding what juries are directed to consider when they deliberate on rape cases.

Miller is an international playwright, librettist and screenwriter. She has a background in law, and has won numerous awards, including the Australian Writers’ Guild, Kit Denton Fellowship for Writing with Courage and an Olivier Award.

Guides from the Bannau Brycheiniog National Park lead a walk through the beautiful surrounds of Hay-on-Wye. You’ll be joined by local experts who will give their insights into this treasured landscape.

Hay-on-Wye is located within 520 square miles of beautiful landscape that makes up the Bannau Brycheiniog National Park. The National Park is driving change to bring about a sustainable future, meeting our needs within planetary boundaries. Their Hay Festival series of walks take you into the town’s local environment while offering the opportunity to learn more about the Park’s work and its treasured landscape.

We’re going on a bear hunt. We’re going to catch a big one. Will you come too? For a quarter of a century, readers have been swishy-swashying and splash-sploshing through this award-winning classic. Follow household favourite and former Children’s Laureate Michael Rosen and wade through the grass, splash through the river and squelch through the mud in search of a bear. What a surprise awaits us in the cave on the other side of the dark forest!

Join David Lindo, also known as the Urban Birder, for a birding walk along the River Wye to celebrate his debut children’s book Fly. On the walk you’ll learn endless facts about the wildlife near Hay Festival and spot many birds, potentially even the elusive Kingfisher! Be sure to bring your binoculars if you have a pair for this special guided event.

Please dress for the weather – wellies advised.

Online sensation Master Shi Heng Yi leads this guided workshop, revealing the wisdom of Shaolin teachings for modern life. Shi Heng Yi founded the Shaolin Temple Europe. He will share powerful exercises in breathwork, movement and mindfulness to help release tension, build body awareness and access hidden layers of your being.

Reflecting the teachings in his new book Shaolin Spirit, these tried and tested routines are the foundations of Zen Buddhism as well as the source of power for Kung Fu warriors – and you can master them too, unlocking the potential hidden inside you.

British broadcaster Naga Munchetty (BBC Breakfast) leads a candid discussion about women’s health and pain, exploring why the healthcare system can often feel rigged against women.

Munchetty spoke out in 2023 about her diagnosis of the gynaecological condition adenomyosis and her struggles to be taken seriously by healthcare professionals despite years of pain and symptoms. In response, scores of women shared their own stories of feeling dismissed by doctors, and Munchetty went on to campaign on the issue. Her book It’s Probably Nothing explores the challenges of being heard, diagnosed and treated.

In this event Munchetty looks at why women’s pain and health issues have historically been ignored – and why pain has been viewed as an innate part of being female – and highlights the things women need to do to advocate for themselves in the healthcare system.

The leading environmental experts examine the uncomfortable truths at the heart of the climate and nature crises, and reveal the system shifts needed to achieve real change, in conversation with the co-Executive Director of Greenpeace UK.

Climate researcher Dr Friederike Otto, author of Climate Injustice, has been described as “the scientist finding climate change’s smoking gun” (Wired). Her bracing investigation into extreme weather’s impact on the world’s most vulnerable reveals the failures of political and social infrastructures around the world and shines a light on the damage inflicted on real lives.

Leading environmentalist and Chair of Natural England Tony Juniper CBE (Just Earth) identifies the real problem – that inequality is the main obstacle blocking action. We can’t fight the climate and nature crises without addressing the ever-widening gaps between the rich and poor, the powerful and the weak.

The authors introduce their most recent novels. Clare Chambers’ Shy Creatures follows Helen, an art therapist in a psychiatric hospital in the 1960s, who finds her affair with a married doctor beginning to fray after a locked-away man is discovered in a nearby house. Andrew Miller’s The Land in Winter, also set in the 1960s, looks at a doctor keeping secrets from his pregnant wife and a troubled woman distanced from her farmer husband. When a cold December gives way to violent blizzards, the two couples find their lives beginning to unravel.

Chambers’ Small Pleasures was longlisted for the Women’s Prize and won the British Book Award. Miller won the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, and has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the Whitbread Novel Award. His novel Pure was a Costa Book of the Year.

They discuss their writing, the ways of the human heart and how ordinary lives are built of delicate layers of experience.

For Antony Szmierek, sincerity is everything. “I’m not being ironic, using a persona or wearing a mask, my music is just me expressing myself honestly,” he says. “There’s nowt to hide behind. It’s sincerity on overdrive – a space where people can connect with each other.”

In this event the Manchester-based poet, writer and producer presents his debut book Roadmap, featuring lyrics from his debut album, with additional poems, sketches and stories.

Szmierek’s debut album Service Station at the End of the Universe is a nod both to the service stations that he spent much of the past year in while gigging around the UK, as well as an homage to Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s sequel. A tongue-in-cheek tale of “punks, weirdos and Manchester characters” all stationed at a mythical rest stop, it’s also Antony’s own exploration of his life today. He talks to poet Len Pennie.

Where do you live? What does it look like? And why does your sense of home matter so much? Join Emma Barnett, BBC broadcaster and founder of nationwide colouring book company Colour Your Streets, along with her husband and co-founder Jeremy Weil, to draw and colour in places in your area that are important to you. All materials provided… just bring your imagination.

From social change and hope to the climate crisis and masculinity, there’s not a subject Rebecca Solnit can’t turn her mind to. In this event with farmer and author James Rebanks, she discusses No Straight Road Takes You There: Essays for Uneven Terrain, a collection of essays revolving around the power of activism and covering subjects including women’s rights, the fight for democracy, trends in masculinity and the rise of the far right in the West.

Solnit is author of more than 20 books, including Recollections of My Non-Existence, which was longlisted for the 2021 Orwell Prize for Political Writing and shortlisted for the 2021 James Tait Black Award, and the collection of essays Men Explain Things to Me.

Dying: do we all have a right to defend ourselves against intolerable suffering? Or should the law prohibit assisted dying; revere human life for its own sake? Our panel discuss the moral, legal and practical issues arising from the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill 2024 that is now working its way through Parliament.

Henry Marsh is a neurosurgeon, author of And Finally: Matters of Life and Death, who defends a right to euthanasia. Sonia Sodha is a journalist whose recent exploration of assisted dying for a BBC Radio documentary led her to change her mind, and now opposes it. Lord Sumption is an historian and former Supreme Court judge who decided the last ‘test’ case on assisted dying (Nicklinson). Alex Goodman KC is a barrister specialising in human rights, who briefed MPs in Westminster on the 2024 Bill.

Spanish food has never been so accessible or delicious – in this tasting event José Pizarro, the ‘Godfather of Spanish Food’, will prepare fresh recipes from his latest cookbook The Spanish Pantry. He’ll demonstrate his use of the staples – tomatoes, peppers, garlic and olive oil – together with the typically Spanish Manchego, chorizo and jamón, to produce some of his ‘greatest hits’, which he’ll then offer up for tasting.

Pizarro’s food is simple in ingredients yet punchy on taste – an authentic collection of paella, tortilla, croquetas, classic stews and desserts. Pizarro runs tapas bar José and restaurants Lolo and Pizarro among others. He is a regular on BBC’s Saturday Kitchen and Channel 4’s Sunday Brunch.

Join Liz Pichon, the bestselling and award-winning creator of Tom Gates, as she launches her new series, The Mubbles. Discover the Isle of Smile and find out what’s behind the uncertain curtain? There’ll be music, games and lots of doodling to do.

Pichon’s Tom Gates series has won the Roald Dahl Funny Prize, the Blue Peter Book Award for Best Story and the younger fiction category of the Waterstones Children’s Book Prize. In the twelve years since the series began, the Tom Gates books have inspired the nation’s children to get creative, whether through reading, drawing, doodling, writing, making, playing music or performing.

Please bring your own sketchbook and pencils to this event.

David Lindo, also known as the Urban Birder, is a writer, broadcaster, photographer and educator. Through his broad array of work, his goals are to inspire people to engage with birds in urban environments, and show how birding can be accessible to all. Join him in this exciting event to learn all about his work and his love of birding.