Hay Festival 2025 Full Programme

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.

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.

The hilarious Adam Buxton, of comedy duo Adam and Joe, shares his follow-up to Ramble Book with broadcaster Samira Ahmed. I Love You, Byeee is a second volume of wonderfully idiosyncratic memoirs that veer off on unexpected tangents and cover topics from David Bowie to parenthood.

Joe Cornish, David Bowie, Louis Theroux, The Adam & Joe Show, Stephen!, Rosie – the great and the good of the wonderful world of Dr Buckles all make an appearance as Adam explores the joys of comedy. He also navigates adulthood, losing loved ones and working out how to be a parent. Full of funny anecdotes, cut through with Adam’s rambling asides – buckle up for a delightful event about growing up, growing old and figuring it all out.

Psychologist Dr Julie Smith (Why Has Nobody Told Me This Before?) offers comfort and perspective on a multitude of sticky situations. When being human gets complicated; when you feel overwhelmed; when there’s pressure to perform; you’re grieving; making big decisions; when you get it wrong as a parent; when you want to win the argument; when you’re overthinking everything; when you want to fit in; and many more.

She gives her trademark simple and straightforward advice to help us see clearly how best to respond and act, returning us to a place of calm, strength and positivity.

The author, online educator and clinical psychologist has a combined following of almost nine million, gained from her drive to create accessible, good quality mental health resources.

Dale Vince, nicknamed ‘Labour’s Green Knight’, is a green industrialist dedicated to championing environmental sustainability. Since founding the world’s first green energy company, Ecotricity, he has been on a mission to change the face of the industry by leading the move away from fossil fuels towards renewables.

Using business as a tool for environmentalism, Vince is helping to lead the eco revolution. He runs Forest Green Rovers FC, dubbed the world’s greenest football team by FIFA; creates diamonds out of atmospheric carbon; builds windmills for export around the world; has launched a range of vegan burgers; and last year launched the world’s first electric airline. He also made the world’s first electric supercar and built the UK’s first national network of EV charging stations.

He has been awarded an OBE for services to the environment and was appointed UN Ambassador for Climate Change in 2019. His book Manifesto shares the tools for changing the world.

In conversation with broadcaster, journalist and TV presenter, Bidisha.

Michael Pedersen is Writer in Residence at the University of Edinburgh and the Edinburgh Makar (Poet Laureate). His The Cat Prince & Other Poems won the Books Are My Bag Readers Awards Best Poetry and his first novel Boy Friends was a Sunday Times Critics Choice. He discusses his new novel Muckle Flugga with Hay Festival President Stephen Fry.

It’s no ordinary existence on the rugged isle of Muckle Flugga. The elements run riot and the very rocks that shape the place begin to shift under their influence. The only human inhabitants are the lighthouse keeper and his otherworldly son – just them, and the occasional lodger. When a new lodger arrives from Edinburgh, old and new ways collide...

A dazzling and bittersweet romantic drama from acclaimed filmmaker Mia Hansen-Løve (Eden, Things to Come), Bergman Island tells the story of two couples spending their summer on the breathtaking island of Fårö, where revered filmmaker Ingmar Bergman lived and worked for over forty years.

Chris (Vicky Krieps) and Tony (Tim Roth) are both filmmakers, hoping to find inspiration for their next films as they retreat to the island to work on their screenplays. Meanwhile Amy (Mia Wasikowska) and Joseph (Anders Danielsen Lie), who were once lovers, are staying on Fårö to celebrate the wedding of their friend. As the summer passes by, the lines between reality and fiction become increasingly blurred as reminders of Bergman’s legacy playfully influence both stories.

Set against the stunning landscape of the Swedish island, Hansen-Løve’s latest feature is laced with characteristically semi-autobiographical elements, and is both a mischievous and elegant contemplation of love, memory and the journey of the creative process.

“A masterful dissection of love, memory and autobiography” – Little White Lies

Across two series of the BBC Radio 4 podcast The Coming Storm, presenter Gabriel Gatehouse has journeyed deep into the tangled undergrowth of American conspiracy culture – exploring the roots of the storming of the Capitol – and the world as it looks from the MAGA perspective.

In this event, presenter Gabriel Gatehouse, producer Lucy Proctor, and other shadowy editorial figures behind the podcast discuss how many of the themes that the team have been investigating over the past years have now come to fruition, and reveal the forces at work behind the decisions that have defined Trump’s second presidency so far. From Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency to Ukraine, from health and education to the intelligence services, a cast of characters we’ve been following for years are finally getting their way.

Clara Kumagai burst on the YA scene last year with the popular Catfish Rolling, a 2024 Yoto Carnegie Medal nominee. Now she’s back, with restless ghosts to be appeased in her new novel, inspired by Puccini’s Madame Butterfly. When Japanese-American teenager Adam discovers a diary in his attic, he is enthralled by its account of a young Japanese woman’s life. A hundred years separate them yet she, like Adam, is caught between cultures, relationships and heartbreak. She also writes of the ghosts that have begun to seek her out, which Adam dismisses as fantasy – until he too, begins to be haunted. It leads him to Nagasaki, trying to solve the mystery of the diary, and his own identity. And the ghosts gather…

Please bring your own notebook and pen 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.

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.

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.

Join comedian Julian Clary and broadcaster Susie Dent (Countdown) for a lively discussion about writing their new crime novels, and how they call on their careers and experiences for inspiration.

Clary’s Curtain Call to Murder follows dresser Jayne as she tries to solve a murder that takes place on stage at the London Palladium. She’s hindered by the cast, including an ageing lothario, a national treasure and an amateur psychic. In Dent’s Guilty by Definition an anonymous letter arrives at the offices of the Clarendon English Dictionary containing a challenge for the team of lexicographers. But the letter hints at secrets and lies…

They talk to writer and Guardian literary critic Chris Power.

Sir Graham Brady has been the Chairman of the 1922 Committee since 2010. As the leader of the group with the power to choose a new leader of the Conservative Party, it is his hand that held the executioner’s axe over five consecutive Conservative Prime Ministers’ heads.

Cameron. May. Johnson. Truss. Sunak. Brady lifts the lid on some of the leadership battles that have defined British politics for a decade and a half. The last fourteen years have seen unprecedented turbulence at the centre of politics. From coalition to Brexit, Covid to Partygate, Trussonomics to the 2024 election, our government has never felt so fractured. And as Prime Ministers have come and gone, Brady has been at the heart of every leadership challenge, seeing all, but saying nothing. Until now. He talks to broadcaster Jane Garvey.

How do we ensure our rivers are clean and nature is restored for future generations?
How do we get ahead of long-term trends that threaten to make the NHS unsustainable?
How can we safeguard our culture and heritage for our children and grandchildren?
When we look around at the world we are leaving behind for future generations – is this the best we can do?

This year marks the tenth anniversary of landmark legislation in Wales requiring public bodies to consider the long-term impact of their decisions on social, economic, environmental and cultural well-being.
Our panel will take a look at the impact of the Well-being of Future Generations (Wales) Act 2015 in Wales, what successes and setbacks there have been, and how this pioneering legislation has influenced countries around the world as well as the UN.

Jane Davidson is Pro Vice-Chancellor Emeritus at the University of Wales Trinity Saint David and chairs the Food, Farming and Countryside Commission’s Wales Inquiry. She proposed the legislation when she was serving in the Welsh government. Kevin Morgan is Professor of Governance and Development in the School of Geography and Planning at Cardiff University. Jane Richardson is the Chief Executive for Amgueddfa Cymru (Museum Wales). Melusi Moyo is Climate Policy Officer at Bannau Brycheiniog National Park Authority. Derek Walker is Future Generations Commissioner for Wales.

The much-loved broadcaster and author (A Year of Living Simply, Where the Hearth Is), introduces her new collection of simple, sustainable recipes from her own kitchen table. Your tastebuds will tingle at the thought of her baba ganoush with flatbreads, apple, cheese & honey tart or chorizo, prawn & butter bean stew, rounded off with chocolate chip cookies or a delicious plum tarte tatin.

Along with her recipes, Humble shares inspiring stories from individuals who play a role in bringing food to our tables, from basket-weavers and apron-makers to blacksmiths and woodworkers, and from potters and glassblowers to fishermen and cheese-makers. She’s joined by artisan makers Alison Lea-Wilson and Jess Lea-Wilson of Halen Môn sea salt, a seasoning business known worldwide for its hand harvested sea salt, and Toria Whitfield, the creative force behind Field & Found, a hand-made clothing and workwear range.

Two women – one based on a real person, one imagined – are at the centre of Lucía Lijtmaer’s Cautery, a savage look at the cheap consolations of meme-ified faux feminism.

The novel follows a young woman whose life looks good from the outside, but who feels intensely unhappy and trapped in her relationship. Four hundred years earlier, another woman flees England for the Massachusetts Bay Colony, where she finds her fortune but discovers independence doesn’t mean freedom from the dangerous vanities of men.

Lijtmaer is a writer and cultural critic, and the curator of the festival of guerrilla and feminist culture, Princesses and Darth Vaders. She codirects, with Isa Calderón, the award-winning podcast Deforme Semanal on Radio Primavera Sound. in conversation with the writer Emma Jane Unsworth.

Join our celebrated pizzaioli for an entertaining, hands-on workshop that will teach you everything that you knead to know about how to make pizzas. Since nothing complements pizza quite like a perfect glass of wine, let us pair and enjoy Italian wine together with your pizza creations.

This 90-minute session includes snacks, a 12” pizza of your own creation and complementary wine throughout. Dairy-free and gluten-free options available.

The Hay Festival President weaves together the final fabulous threads of the tapestry he began in Mythos and continued in Heroes and Troy. The most famous heroic story of all time, Homer’s Odyssey is full of monsters, murder, maelstroms, gods, giants, wit, wisdom – and the most cunning hero of them all: Odysseus.

After ten years of war and the final fall of Troy, the victorious Greeks head home. Odysseus dreams of returning to his beloved wife and son. But sea god Poseidon has other plans for our hero. From titanic whirlpools to hypnotic sirens, and from seductive witches to jealous goddesses, Odysseus is tempted and tormented beyond any man’s endurance. Yet the lure of his family draws him, step by step, closer to home and his destiny.