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.

Featured in the BBC’s Digging for Britain, Snodhill Castle is the hidden gem of the Golden Valley. Explore the Norman ruins in their medieval parkland setting, including the high keep, the newly conserved Royal Free Chapel site and wall walk, and the C15th ‘panic room’ with its fortified latrine chutes. Hear the story of its discovery and preservation, from an expert guide.

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 Ellie Chowns, Green Party MP for North Herefordshire and Simon Hart, Conservative politician and author of The Sunday Times Top 5 Bestseller Ungovernable.

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.

Come and hear the full, funny, feminist and entertaining story of one of our best-loved, and most versatile, actors. Alison Steadman recounts her inspiring and exhilarating journey from Liverpool to London drama school, and looks back over her many stellar roles, from Beverley’s overbearing party hosting and Mrs Bennet’s ailing ‘nerves’ to Pamelaaaa’s instantly-regretted vegetarian declaration.

Growing up in Liverpool as the entertainer of the family, impersonating neighbours to the delight of her friends and playing pranks on her unwitting mother, the young Alison Steadman had no idea of the roles and awards in store for her. But when she snuck off to London to audition for drama school in secret, she started the process of becoming one of today’s greatest character actors.

Travel through time back to Ancient Egypt with the author of the Adventures on Trains and The Twitchers series. Discover how a trip down the Nile inspired her newest fast-paced adventure, the first in her new Time Keys series. Explore the Valley of the Kings, where the tombs of the Pharaohs can be found, unravel the ancient art of mummification, learn about heart scarabs, the Book of the Dead and the possible location of the lost tomb of Nefertiti. The perfect event for adventure enthusiasts, budding Egyptologists and time travellers!

Author/illustrator Huw Aaron performs a laugh-out-loud read-along of his new picture book Sleep Tight, Disgusting Blob – because even monsters need a bedtime story! You can also join in a wild and wacky monster draw-along with Huw. Warm, funny… and slimy, Sleep Tight, Disgusting Blob is a rhyming delight, ending with a kiss and sweet dreams for all.

Please bring your own sketchbook and pencils to this event.

Mary Trump grew up in the shadow of her father Freddy’s humiliation at the hands of his father Fred. Fred believed that among his children there could only be one winner, and rather than it being his namesake Freddy, that winner was now-president Donald Trump.

But Freddy never stopped trying to gain his father’s approval. Aged 42, he finally succumbed to Fred’s lethal contempt and died alone in an emergency room.

Mary Trump, niece of President Trump, reveals the inside story of the Trump family and its patriarch, and the effect it had on her own life, to broadcaster Samira Ahmed. This event offers a unique and personal insight into the Trump family and the cold, selfish cruelty that has come to define it. Trump is a psychologist and writer, author of Too Much and Never Enough.

Join the inimitable Ben Okri as he introduces his new work Madame Sosostris & the Festival for the Broken-Hearted, an homage to TS Eliot’s The Waste Land.

The novella tells the story of Viv, who throws a festival on the 20th anniversary of the day her first husband left her. There, the special guest is world-renowned clairvoyant and fortune-teller Madame Sosostris, not seen since the pages of The Waste Land.

Okri has won many prizes for his fiction, and is also an acclaimed essayist, playwright and poet. In 2019 his Astonishing the Gods was named as one of the BBC’s 100 Novels That Shaped Our World.

David Reid’s book Running the Risk is a guide to understanding life’s biggest risks – from shark attacks to nuclear disaster – and how we build a safer future. From the seemingly mundane act of crossing the road to the complex web of global connections, risk permeates our daily existence – but doesn’t have to blight it.

Hey is responsible for leading the World Risk Poll, Impact and establishing a Global Safety Evidence Centre for the Lloyds Register Foundation. The World Risk Poll and Resilience Index is the first and only global study of worry about, and harm from, risks to people’s safety. These unique data are collected and made freely available by the Foundation as a public good.

David Reid is Director of Global Advocacy at Lloyd’s Register Foundation, while Nancy Hey is the Foundation’s Director of Evidence & Insight. In conversation with Hay Festival Sustainability Director Andy Fryers, they consider the effects of risk and explore how we can redefine our understanding of resilience.

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!

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.

The presenter of BBC Radio 4’s Making History, and co-presenter of The Rest is History podcast, brings his expertise to bear on Suetonius’ renowned biography of the twelve Caesars. The ancient Roman empire was the supreme arena, where emperors had no choice but to fight, thrill and dazzle. Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus’ Lives of the Caesars was written from the centre of Rome and power in AD 121, and no biography invites us in more vividly or intimately.

Tom Holland presents his new translation, giving a deeper understanding of the personal lives of the Caesars and of how they inevitably informed what happened across the vast expanse of the empire. Holland is author of Rubicon: The Triumph and the Tragedy of the Roman Republic.

Two environmental researchers find themselves confronting the same nexus of grief for beloved ancestors and grief at climate breakdown. They discuss their books with natural history writer Patrick Barkham.

Marianne Brown’s The Shetland Way tells how travelling to her father’s funeral leads her to investigate a huge wind farm project in a tight-knit Shetland community, and how her questioning is tied up with grief. Alice Mah’s Red Pockets recounts how she returns to her ancestors’ village in China only to find she has debts to pay because their graves haven’t been swept for decades. She starts seeing a deep connection with her research on pollution, which intensifies her own experience of climate grief.

Raised in Edinburgh, Brown spent many years working as a journalist in Southeast Asia and later in Britain as the editor of an environmental magazine. Alice Mah is a Chinese Canadian-British writer and Professor of Urban and Environmental Studies at the University of Glasgow.

Irish novelist Ferdia Lennon discusses the runaway success of his first novel, Glorious Exploits, which won the 2024 Waterstones Debut Fiction Prize and the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for comic fiction, and has been adapted for BBC Radio 4.

Ancient Sicily. Enter Gelon: visionary, dreamer, theatre lover. Enter Lampo: lovesick, jobless, in need of a distraction. Imprisoned in the quarries of Syracuse, thousands of defeated Athenians hang on by the thinnest of threads. They’re fading in the baking heat, but not everything is lost: they can still recite lines from Greek tragedy when tempted by Lampo and Gelon with goatskins of wine and scraps of food. And so an idea is born. Because, after all, you can hate the invaders but still love their poetry. It’s audacious. It might even be dangerous. But like all the best things in life – love, friendship, art itself – it will reveal the very worst, and the very best, of what humans are capable of. What could possibly go wrong?

A BBC Radio 3 lunchtime concert series marking the 150th anniversary of Maurice Ravel’s birth. This second of three recitals recorded for broadcast explores the music of Ravel and others. The Mithras Trio – Ionel Manciu (violin), Leo Popplewell (cello) and Dominic Degavino (piano) – perform a programme including Ravel, Bonis and Tailleferre.

Programme:

Mélanie Bonis Soir et Matin, Op 76

Germaine Tailleferre Piano Trio

Maurice Ravel Piano Trio

Join broadcaster and author Kate Humble (Humble by Nature, Thinking on My Feet) and a guide from Inntravel (specialists in self-guided walking, cycling and rail holidays) on a walk exploring the border between England and Wales, which wraps itself tightly around Hay-on-Wye. Chat to Kate – who styles herself ‘happier outdoors than in’ – about her love of the countryside, and why going for a daily walk is as essential as that first cup of tea, to make her feel good for the rest of the day.

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.