Hay Festival 2025 Full Programme

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.

Come and join Rooted Forest School for some outdoor family sessions offering natural creativity for everyone. We’ll use willow and natural materials to create a collaborative piece of nature art in the Family Garden. Dress for the weather and expect to get messy! These sessions will run whatever the weather, so make sure you’re wrapped up for the conditions.

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.

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.

For more than three decades the Moral Maze on BBC Radio 4 has brought together different worldviews and challenged conventional thinking in the spirit of philosophical enquiry. Come and join a lively, provocative and engaging debate, examining an ethical issue of the day, chaired by the veteran BBC journalist Michael Buerk. With panellists: Ash Sarkar (writer at Novara Media), Anne McElvoy (journalist and executive editor at POLITICO), James Orr (Cambridge philosopher) and Mona Siddiqui (professor of Islamic and Interreligious studies at the University of Edinburgh).

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.

Join us for an exclusive guided tour led by one of our passionate volunteer guides during Hay Festival 2025. Our knowledgeable guides will take you on a captivating journey through the castle, revealing tales of medieval knights, royal intrigue and the castle’s remarkable restoration. As you explore the castle you’ll gain unique insights into the lives of those who once called this place home. The tour also offers breathtaking views of the surrounding countryside, providing the perfect backdrop for your visit.

Guided tours run daily at 11am and 2pm. Tour price includes entry into the Castle for a year including the current exhibition: 20th Century Welsh Artists.

Enjoy a twenty-minute open air performance between events, of traditional and modern songs from the sea with big harmonies. Hay Shantymen have been performing since 2018, at international shanty festivals such as Falmouth and Port Isaac, and have raised over £15,000 for their chosen charity, the RNLI. Under a new Musical Director, Grant Olding, their arrangements and harmonies are stronger than ever – always sung with engaging wit, warmth and friendship.

The Bafta-winning co-creator of Gavin and Stacey, and the Richard & Judy Book Club author of Love Untold, brings her joyful and life-affirming new novel By Your Side to Hay Festival, in this conversation with journalist and former BBC correspondent Julia Wheeler.

Linda and Levi will never meet. But they’re going to change each other’s lives. Linda investigates the lives of those who’ve died alone and tracks down any living relatives. She’s been a friend to the friendless for the past 33 years, and now she’s looking forward to early retirement. But before she hangs up her lanyard, Linda must take on one last case – that of Levi, a Welshman who’d made his home on a remote Scottish island.

Nuclear war is a far greater immediate threat to humanity’s survival than climate change, yet we are in near-total denial. The environment campaigner and Six Degrees author puts the issue back to the top of the global agenda.

We are standing on a nuclear knife edge, and while climate heating threatens humanity over many decades, nuclear war could destroy civilisation in just a few hours. But the climate experience teaches us that a worldwide mobilisation can work. Lynas presents an unflinching view of the nuclear nightmare, and describes the imperatives for human civilisation to survive long term.

Meet Javier Cercas, one of Spain’s most renowned writers, as he discusses his crime trilogy Terra Alta. Cercas opens up the world of Terra Alta, and delves into the series’ final book, Fortress of Evil, where Melchor – who years before took revenge for his mother’s murder – finds his peace shattered when his teenage daughter Cosette discovers the truth behind her own mother’s death.

Cercas’ awards include the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize for Soldiers of Salamis, the European Book Prize for The Impostor, and the Dagger for Crime Fiction in Translation for Even the Darkest Night, the first book in the Terra Alta trilogy. He talks to journalist Kirsty Lang.

A two-piano concert by husband and wife pianists Maki Sekiya and Ilya Chetverikov in the fine setting of St Mary’s Church. The programme includes Ravel, on the 150th anniversary of his death, as well as the world première of a piece by the Oxford-based composer Jeremy Arden.

Programme:

Maurice Ravel Daphne and Chloe suite

Jeremy Arden Passacaglia (world première)

György Ligeti Three pieces for two pianos: Monument, Self-portrait and Movement

Dmitri Shostakovich Concertino