Hay Festival 2025 Full Programme

The future is uncertain. The future is full of danger. The future is a risk. But there is hope in the future too, for us and the generations after us. Social geographer Danny Dorling and climate activist Rob Hopkins discuss how we should navigate life now to mitigate the effects of the crises we are facing, from the cost of living to climate change, and how we should rethink the future.

Dorling is author of The Next Crisis, in which he unpacks the data on what people really think about when they consider the future. He is the 1971 Professor of Geography, and advises the government and the Office for National Statistics.

Hopkins is co-founder of the international Transition Network movement, which aims to reimagine and rebuild the world. His forthcoming book How to Fall in Love with the Future looks at how we change the world.

Dive into the thrilling life of Raymond Chester, the Oakland Raiders legend. During the 1960s, while America was convulsed following the assassination of Dr Martin Luther King, Chester was making historic changes that brought Black American football into the mainstream. From his college glory at Morgan State to his iconic moments on the NFL field, Chester’s story is one of resilience and triumph which resonates far beyond the world of sport and proves the significance of sport in our social and political lives.

Welsh author and rugby fan Jon Gower’s Raider is based on extensive conversations and interviews with Chester himself – a love-letter from Wales to an American football icon whose legacy transcends the game.

The author of The Lamplighters introduces her suspenseful new novel. The Sunshine Man is the story of a terrible crime that shakes a community, and of a revenge plotted over decades.

Birdie Keller wakes up one freezing January morning to hear that her sister’s killer has been freed from jail. Birdie leaves for London with a pistol and a plan: to find this man and make him pay. She’s been waiting two decades to get him, biding her time: here, at last, revenge. But Jimmy Maguire, the man she’s after, knew Birdie a long time ago, in a life she’d sooner forget. They’ve got history, and he isn’t the only one with a secret.

Come and listen to this year’s celebrated Hay Festival Writers at Work. This thrilling 2025 group of ten Welsh writers will share new fiction and poetry, in English and Cymraeg.

Fee Mak shares her career journey – from her start as a professional ballet dancer with the Royal Ballet School through to becoming a national BBC Radio broadcaster, and her love for literature which has led to her chairing events at leading UK literature festivals.

Join Fee in this workshop-style event, one of this of a Hay Festival series of sessions delivered by inspiring producers and practitioners from the creative industries, giving their insights, experience and advice on progression in their field.

Please bring your own notebook and pen to this event.

Learn to draw some of Chris Haughton’s favourite illustrations from his new book, The History of Information, a graphic handbook to the biggest influence on human history.

In this informative and interesting drawing workshop, Chris will lead you on a journey through time, taking a deep dive into the story of information and how to illustrate it in his distinct signature style.

Chris is author and illustrator of many popular picture books including A Bit Lost, Oh No George!, Shh! We Have a Plan and Well Done, Mummy Penguin.

Reena from Bollywood Dreams Dance Company will teach you some dynamic moves in this fun Bollywood dance workshop. You’ll learn hand gestures, some technique work and choreography. By the end of the session you’ll have formed a fun Bollywood routine to take away and show your friends!

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.

Every Saturday morning, tens of thousands of people across the world gather to walk, run and jog 5km around their local parks. ParkRun has taken off worldwide. But before Paul Sinton-Hewitt founded ParkRun, he was struggling to hold his life together, having lost his successful career, with a marriage that had broken down and a devastating injury that threatened to cut him off from the running club which had been his lifeline.

Sinton-Hewitt talks about coming up with the simple idea of a Saturday morning free weekly run, how it instilled him with connection and purpose, and how it grew from 13 runners in its first week to a ten million strong community across five continents.

We are living through a Long Emergency: a near-continuous train of pandemics, heatwaves, droughts, resource wars and other climate-driven disasters. Two great thinkers at the intersection between politics and everyday life share their thoughts on possible bulwarks against despair.

Adam Greenfield is Senior Urban Fellow at the LSE Cities centre of the London School of Economics. In Lifehouse, he asks what might happen if the tactics and networks of care and local power that spring up in response to climate disasters were brought together in a single, coherent way of life. Danny Sriskandarajah is CEO of progressive thinktank the New Economics Foundation. In Power to the People he presents a blueprint for how we can make a difference through greater community engagement, and how we can deliver a society that works for the many and not the few.

Malcolm X is a titanic figure in political history, but also one of the most misunderstood. Forever known as the violent Yin to Martin Luther King’s Yang, since his death he has been co-opted into the American project and marginalised by decades of governments, academics and activists. But on the centenary of his birthday, in a world shaken by decades of injustice and racism, Malcolm’s political mission is more urgent than ever.

In conversation with poet and actor Connor Allen, Kehinde Andrews – the UK’s first professor of Black Studies, at Birmingham City University – reveals Malcolm's real revolutionary programme. Malcolm’s activism was his philosophy, and paying attention to it reveals the true cultural icon – who, if he were alive today, would tell us to pick up the mantle and overturn this system for good.

Booker-longlisted debut novelist Yael van der Wouden talks to bestselling author Tracy Chevalier (Girl With a Pearl Earring) about twisted desire, histories and homes in The Safekeep.

Fifteen years after the Second World War, and Isabel has built herself a solitary life of discipline and strict routine in her late mother’s country home, with not a fork or a word out of place. But all is upended when her brother Louis delivers his graceless new girlfriend, Eva, at Isabel’s doorstep – as a guest, there to stay for the season… In the sweltering heat of summer, Isabel’s desperate need for control reaches boiling point. What happens between the two women leads to a revelation which threatens to unravel all she has ever known.

The Platform is a new space for young, emerging artists to share their work with Hay Festival audiences. Spanning a diverse range of art forms, The Platform aims to elevate and develop outstanding creative artists at the start of their careers. BBC Radio broadcaster Fee Mak hosts this session, where you can discover and support some of the best young talent working in the UK today.

Award-winning filmmaker Aki Kaurismäki (Le Havre, The Other Side of Hope) makes a masterful return with Fallen Leaves, a timeless, hopeful and satisfying love story that won the Jury Prize at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival.

Set in modern day Helsinki, the film tells the story of Ansa (Alma Pöysti) and Holappa (Jussi Vatanen), two lonely souls whose chance meeting at a local karaoke bar is beset by numerous hurdles. From lost phone numbers to mistaken addresses, alcoholism and a charming stray dog, the pair’s path to happiness is as bittersweet as it is ultimately delightful.

Shot through with Kaurismäki’s typically playful, idiosyncratic style and deadpan sense of humour, this tender romantic tragicomedy is both a loving tribute to the filmmaker’s beloved contemporaries and a timely reminder of the potency of movie-going from one of cinema’s living legends.

“Gorgeous… A heartfelt cinephile ode to the possibility of love” – Little White Lies

Light. Darkness. Power. Magic. Join YA author and TikTok personality Andy Darcy Theo as he talks about his publishing journey and epic Descent into Darkness series. From BookTok to Bookshop, Andy shares the inspiration behind The Light That Blinds Us and his publication journey. He’ll offer top tips for aspiring writers and walk you through an interactive quiz to find out your elemental power! Andy Darcy Theo is a BookToker and Bookstagrammer and has been documenting his author journey as @andydarcytheo.

Reena from Bollywood Dreams Dance Company will teach you some dynamic moves in this fun Bollywood dance workshop. You’ll learn hand gestures, some technique work and choreography. By the end of the session you’ll have formed a fun Bollywood routine to take away and show your friends!

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.

Five innovative garden designers bring their unique vision to mitigating the effects of climate change, encouraging biodiversity and boosting well-being.

Tayshan Hayden-Smith created the Grenfell Garden of Peace following the 2017 Grenfell Tower fire tragedy. Harry Holding is an environmentally conscious landscape and garden designer who won the RHS People’s Choice Award 2023 and RHS Feature Garden 2024. Eelco Hooftman is a landscape architect who has taught at the School of Landscape Architecture at Edinburgh College of Art. Anna Liu is an architect with over 15 years’ experience in art and landscape in Taiwan, Japan, China, USA and UK. Ann-Marie Powell is a broadcaster and designs gardens for private clients, companies and charities.

Hayden-Smith, Holding, Hooftman, Liu and Powell have created ‘The Community Garden’, ‘The Food and Medicine Garden’, ‘The Botanic Garden’, ‘The Garden Square’ and ‘The Family Garden’ respectively for the British Library’s new exhibition Unearthed: The Power of Gardening.

Fans of Burkeman’s popular ‘This Column Will Change Your Life’, which ran for many years in the Guardian, will jump at this chance to navigate the big questions of psychology with the man himself.

How do we embrace the reality of our finiteness? How do we make decisions and act with conviction when there is always too much to do and failure is inevitable? How do we find a deeper sense of purpose when we realise that life is not a problem to be solved? How does care for others make us more free?

Burkemann talks to critic and writer Stephanie Merritt about encouraging us to embrace our limitations, showing how to thrive in an age of bewilderment and make time for what counts.