Hay Festival 2025 Full Programme

Learn the basics of juggling and object manipulation in this workshop with expert tutors from Deviate Creative. You can continue to practise these skills and improve on your own at home. Try out hula hooping, diablo and more, in true Big Top style.

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.

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.

Join award-winning author and illustrator Owen Davey as he introduces us to his incredible new book Zoom Out, which is all about animals and their incredible ecosystems. Owen will be showcasing how to draw some of your favourite animals, alongside a conversation with the World Wildlife Fund about the importance of conservation.

In the book, Owen shows the role that each animal plays in its ecosystem, helping us understand that animals aren’t just valuable in their own right – they’re also part of a wider natural environment. Owen has worked with WWF, Lego and National Geographic, among others.

Please bring your own sketchbook and pencils to this event.

Learn the basics of juggling and object manipulation in this workshop with expert tutors from Deviate Creative. You can continue to practise these skills and improve on your own at home. Try out hula hooping, diablo and more, in true Big Top style.

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 with Feast of Fools, an a cappella quartet from the South West of England singing traditional and contemporary folk songs.

Emma Jane Unsworth is a BAFTA-nominated screenwriter as well as a bestselling novelist. With episodes of Apples’ The Buccaneers and Stephen Merchant’s The Outlaws under her belt, she’s also got film and TV projects of her own on the boil. The author of Animals and Adults talks to novelist and screenwriter Nussaibah Younis about her newest novel, a no-holds-barred, frank and heartfelt exploration of sisterhood, friendship and teenage obsession. In Slags, sisters Sarah and Juliette are going on a whisky-fuelled campervan road-trip across Scotland to celebrate Juliette’s birthday – and they’re going to dig up some demons from the past.

Dive into the hidden history of man-made remains found in the Welsh Uplands, in this event perfect for enthusiasts of history, archaeology and landscape.

Historian Richard Hayman acts as our guide to everything from Neolithic chambered tombs to the World Heritage landscapes of Blaenavon and the North Wales slate industry, illuminating the fascinating, under-appreciated and hidden history and archaeology of the Welsh mountains.

Hayman is an independent historian and archaeologist who writes about the cultural history of buildings and places in Britain. Between 2000 and 2014 he contributed to the Uplands Archaeology Initiative, organised by RCAHM Wales, during which time he explored and recorded unknown archaeological sites in every upland region of Wales.

Earlier this year, American journalist McKay Coppins shared a rare and wide-ranging interview with James Murdoch, Rupert Murdoch’s second-oldest son, who is often portrayed as a bitter rival to his older brother, Lachlan. Coppins speaks to Guto Harri, former Communications Director for Rupert Murdoch’s News International, about what he learned.

James Murdoch was seated at a conference table in a Manhattan law office in March 2024 when he realised he was witnessing the final dissolution of his family. Three months earlier, his father, Rupert, had told James and his sisters that he was rewriting the family trust to grant his elder son, Lachlan, full control of the Murdoch empire after his death, rather than splitting it equally among his four oldest children. The amendment was part of a secret plan that the patriarch’s allies had code-named ‘Project Family Harmony.’

Two acclaimed Welsh authors discuss their work with the National Poet of Wales. Claire’s Welsh Giants, Ghosts & Goblins was Waterstones Welsh Book of the Year 2024. She mixes stories from all parts of Wales, reimagined through her own, idiosyncratic lens, with the character of Idris the Giant weaving them together.

Manon’s The Blue Book of Nebo explores the aftermath of a worldwide catastrophe through the eyes of a small nuclear family in a remote village in near-future Wales. Manon has won Wales Book of the Year as well as being four-times winner of the Tir na N’Og Welsh children’s literature award.

Jenny Valentine has been thinking about lists. Long lists, short lists, shopping lists, wish lists, missing lists, to-do lists. Everybody writes them, one way or another. Our lists say more about us than we realise. And they can be very helpful when you are writing a story!

Come and make some lists with Jenny about everyday things or life and death things. Jenny will introduce you to her latest YA novel, Us in the Before and After, a tear-jerking, heartbreakingly beautiful read about the fallout of a sudden death and the lifelong consequences of a single tragic act.

Learn the basics of juggling and object manipulation in this workshop with expert tutors from Deviate Creative. You can continue to practise these skills and improve on your own at home. Try out hula hooping, diablo and more, in true Big Top style.