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.

Come to Andrew Giles’ farm with local vet Barney Sampson and agronomist Jonathon Harrington to see how his herd of dairy cows produce most of their milk from grass. You can enter the milking parlour and help to milk some of the cows. Learn how the cows are fed and find out how their four stomachs enable them to digest grass. You can taste samples of the dairy products, and a local cheese maker will explain the art and science beneath the rind.

With thanks to Andrew Giles for welcoming us to his farm.

Broadcaster Jeremy Bowen shares insights into the Middle East and Ukraine, and looks at the increasing global instability. Bowen, who is the BBC’s International Editor and has reported from the war on Palestine, brings his wealth of experience from reporting across the world to the conversation, offering nuanced views on current conflicts, political figures and economic realities.

Bowen is a seasoned war correspondent. His podcast Our Man in the Middle East sees him journey through the region and its history, meeting ordinary men and women on the front line, and exploring the power games that have often wreaked devastation on civilian populations.

Join him to take a look at how the world is changing, what this new era of global instability means to societies across the world, and the things we need to grapple with – from changes in political leadership to new types of warfare – to understand the world today.

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 are philosopher AC Grayling, founder and principal of the New College of the Humanities at Northeastern University, London, and former BBC North America editor Jon Sopel, author of Strangeland.

Join writers and editors of the Times Literary Supplement along with special guests for a live recording of their weekly podcast on books and culture.

Guides from the Bannau Brycheiniog National Park lead a walk through the beautiful surrounds of Hay-on-Wye. Learn more about Hay-on-Wye’s iconic ancient and veteran trees.

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.

Return to Wonderland with Anna James (author of the Pages & Co series) as she presents her enchanted new tale, Alice with a Why. This interactive event features Mad Hatters, White Rabbits and some brand new faces, too, in a celebration of Lewis Carroll’s beloved original as it marks its 160th anniversary year.

Alyce – with a Y – lives with her grandmother, the original Alice, having lost her father during the great war. When a mysterious invitation to a tea party hits her square in the face, Alyce realises her grandmother’s strange stories of a place called Wonderland might have some truth to them after all. But the land Alyce finds herself in feels different to the Wonderland of her grandmother’s stories – how can she find her way back home?

“Everyone’s favourite pantomime dame,” (according to Metro) is heading to Hay Festival to celebrate her first picture book. Influenced by a childhood seeing pantos, Oh Yes I Am! explores the magic of pantomime and how it can make the world a brighter place. Join award-winning panto professional Mama G for an hour of panto fun, find out what it takes to be a panto dame, discover panto’s weird and wacky history, hear some really bad jokes and share your sparkle and shine with everyone!

Step into the story with now>press>play! In between events, try out this immersive audio adventure for all the family. Hear every sound, move with the action and feel the magic of storytelling come alive around you.

Your Mum’s flowers are wilting in the summer sun and you’re too hot to water them. There’s a strange clock on the wall that doesn’t tell the time, but instead tells what season it is. Surely if you could change the hand to winter, then it wouldn’t be so hot? But be careful what you wish for!

The hopes, frustrations, loves and fears of soldiers – many of them first-timers – are shared by historian Max Hastings in his vivid recounting of the actions of three divisions on and around a single British beach.

Taking in their interminable years of training in England, through to triumphs and tragedies on the beach and beyond, Hastings shares how his decades of study, veterans’ interviews and new archive research led him to write Sword: D-Day – Trial by Battle. With personal portraits and searching analysis, Hastings changes the way we look at and understand D-Day.

Hastings has written over 30 books, and during his time as a correspondent reported on conflicts including the Vietnam War, the 1973 Yom Kippur War and the 1982 Falklands War.

Through her unprecedented reading of Homer’s Iliad, a story thousands of years old, award-winning classicist Edith Hall helps us understand the history of the ecological disaster that threatens our planet.

The roots of today’s environmental catastrophe run deep into humanity’s past, and Hall looks at how – under the story of war and its effects – the Iliad documents the environmental practices of the ancient Greeks and betrays an awareness of the dangers posed by the destruction of the natural landscape.

Hall argues the Iliad can inspire activism to rescue our planet from disaster in this eye-opening event, after which you’ll never view the classic Greek tale the same way again.

Hall is a professor in the Department of Classics and Ancient History at Durham University. She has written over 30 books, including most recently Facing Down the Furies: Suicide, the Ancient Greeks, and Me.

Award-winning author Tash Aw introduces his new novel The South, the first in an extraordinary quartet exploring the lives of a family navigating huge changes in the world. The South follows Jay as he travels south to rural Malaysia with his family, there working on the land and forming a charged connection with Chuan, the son of the farm’s manager.

Aw discusses his sweeping and intimate novel, writing a reimagined epic for our times, and how his own experiences influenced the book. He is author of four novels, including We, the Survivors and a memoir of a Chinese-Malaysian family, Strangers on a Pier. His work has won the Whitbread and Commonwealth Prizes and twice been longlisted for the Booker Prize.

Professor Robert Winston leads a scientific journey through human history, featuring fascinating facts, innovative inventions and daring discoveries. Learn how accidents have led to some of the greatest findings we’ve ever seen, and how anybody who dares to dream can be successful. Have you ever been asked when writing was invented? Or how electricity works?

Robert covers it all – from evolution and the first tools to exploring microchips and the internet. If you’re constantly asking ‘how’ and ‘why’ things happen, this event is for you, as he’ll be on hand with (almost) all the answers to the questions that even adults find tricky!

Rajiv has feelings for everything. He can feel confident. He can feel happy. He can feel silly. But today, he feels angry and he doesn’t know why. With the help of his father, he sets out on a journey to make sense of his feelings. It is a journey that will take him to a park, up into the branches of a tree, and all the way to the stars…

Join award-winning non-binary storyteller Niall to share this heartwarming story about understanding and embracing big emotions. Through captivating narrative and an engaging art activity, we’ll explore the beauty of self-expression and the magic of feelings.

Please bring your own sketchbook and pencils to draw along in this event.

The author of Inkheart and Dragon Rider, Cornelia Funke shares the magic in her new and exciting mystery set in the heart of New York City. Come and hear how Caspia’s summer in the city is transformed when she discovers a bundle of letters containing ten botanical riddles. She sets out to solve the riddles and, as she does, she meets friends she could never have imagined and discovers that anywhere can feel like home, if you are brave enough to put down new roots.

Please bring your own notebook and pen to this event.

Look out for the Scavenger Trail around the Festival site, inspired by Cornelia Funke’s The Green Kingdom.

Step into the story with now>press>play! In between events, try out this immersive audio adventure for all the family. Hear every sound, move with the action and feel the magic of storytelling come alive around you.

After weeks going hungry in your stone house, you’re desperate to join your dad and sister, Etta, out on the hunt. But the hunt party is attacked by wolves, and in the confusion you and Etta get lost and discover a house made of wood. What other new technologies do these people possess, and how will they lead you back to your dad?

Head into the forest with explorer Levison Wood as he shares the profound influence forests have had on our planet and civilisation. Having spent a lifetime exploring wild places and witnessing environmental challenges and conservation efforts around the world, Wood now turns his attention to the forest in The Great Tree Story, and will discuss the book and his experiences of woodlands around the world.

Wood is a bestselling author, photographer and explorer. He has written seven other books, including Walking the Himalayas, which won Adventure Travel Book of the Year at the Edward Stanford Travel Writing Awards.

Join acclaimed writers and longstanding friends Kate Mosse and Jacqueline Wilson for an intimate chat encompassing their thoughts on life, writing and creative inspiration.

Both writers of strong female characters, the pair also share a sense of adventure in real life. Far from resting on their publishing laurels, Mosse recently toured a one-woman show of Labyrinth, while Wilson has just published Think Again, her first adult novel in a career spanning five decades. Similarly Mosse will also be publishing her first book for a young adult audience later this year.

They discuss revisiting characters many years after first creating them, how books can take on a life of their own, in adaptations and otherwise, and give insights into how their writing life changed following the success of their books. Mosse is founder director of the Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction and Women’s Prize for Fiction, for which Wilson has been a judge.

From medicine, politics and travel to belief, economics and the role of women, art historian Amy Jeffs shares what the strange legends of saints tell us about the medieval world.

Today, many of the saintly heroes of medieval Britain are all but forgotten, and Jeffs sets out to right this wrong in her book Saints: New Legendary of Heroes, Humans and Magic, arguing that we should treat saints’ stories with the same reverence with which we treat myth or folklore.

Jeffs takes us on a deep dive into the earthy, visceral and unruly medieval cults suppressed when the saints’ shrines were torn down. As well as Saints, she is author of the bestselling Storyland: A New Mythology of Britain and Wild: Tales from Early Medieval Britain.