Hay Festival 2025 Full Programme

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.

Israel’s war on Gaza and Lebanon has brought to light two competing narratives of the last century: the West’s triumphant account of victory over Nazi and communist totalitarianism versus the global majority’s frequently thwarted version of racial equality.

In his new book The World After Gaza, Indian essayist and novelist Pankaj Mishra takes the war in the Middle East, and the bitterly polarised reaction to it, as the starting point for a broad reevaluation of these two narratives.

Mishra talks to historian William Dalrympleand Benjamin Moser Pulitzer winner of Sontag: Her Life and Work, whose book on Jewish anti-Zionists is forthcoming in 2026, about how the world’s balance of power is shifting, and why it is critically important to enter into the experiences and perspectives of the majority of the world’s population. His previous books include From the Ruins of Empire and Age of Anger: A History of the Present.

A diagnosis can seem like a blessing, helping us to understand what might be ailing us physically and mentally. But what if a diagnosis can actually do us more harm than good?

Neurologist Dr Suzanne O’Sullivan talks to geneticist and science communicator Adam Rutherford about how diagnoses can risk turning healthy people into patients, with no benefit to their long-term health.

They discuss how categories like depression and ADHD are constantly shifting and expanding, meaning what is considered ‘normal’ radically changes all the time, and how health screening is increasingly drawing previously ‘healthy’ people into the category of disease.

O’Sullivan specialises in the investigation of complex epilepsy and also has an active interest in psychogenic disorders. Her first book It’s All in Your Head won the Wellcome Book Prize and the Royal Society of Biology Book Prize.

Land is one of our most precious commodities, and yet our relationship and the way we take care of it is in desperate need of a reset. Writers Tom Heap and Guy Shrubsole discuss the damage done to our land, how we fix it to ensure we get the food, energy and housing we need, and the people working to restore the land.

In Land Smart, Heap tours the British countryside meeting the people who are solving the most pressing challenges facing our countryside, and transforming our world. He is a regular presenter on BBC1’s Countryfile, and has made many BBC Panorama documentaries on food, energy and the environment.

Shrubsole’s book The Lie of the Land looks at how a small number of landowners have laid waste to some of our most treasured landscapes. An environmental campaigner and writer, he is author of The Lost Rainforests of Britain, which won the Wainwright Prize for Writing on Conservation.

Two writers discuss grief and writing about grief with the Monocle Radio books editor Georgina Godwin.

Peter Godwin’s Exit Wounds considers the life of émigrés, exiles and refugees, while telling the story of his mother’s death, his family’s secrets and the many meanings of home. Godwin is an award-winning foreign correspondent, author, documentary-maker and screenwriter.

Sigrid Rausing discusses finishing the memoir of her friend, the celebrated Swedish writer Johanna Ekström. When Ekström found out that she was dying from an eye melanoma she asked Rausing to finish her last book. And the Walls Became the World All Around showcases Ekström’s vivid imagination, writerly precision and psychological insight, interwoven with Rausing’s spare and sober reflections. Rausing is publisher of Granta magazine and Granta Books.

William Rayfet Hunter’s dazzling novel Sunstruck explores race, status and the parts of ourselves we risk losing when we fall in love.

Sunstruck follows a young man as he spends the summer with the Blake siblings: his carefree friend Lily, her rebellious younger sister Dot and the handsome and charismatic Felix. But when summer fades and the group returns to London, the cracks in the Blakes’ careful façade begin to show.

Hunter’s book won the #Merky Books New Writers' Prize 2022. They talk to author, activist and journalist Shon Faye.

Get a behind-the-scenes look at what it’s really like to judge one of the most beloved book prizes in the world. Kit de Waal (My Name is Leon) and Kavita Puri (Partition Voices), who are chairing the 2025 Women’s Prize for Fiction and Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction panels respectively, join Kate Mosse, novelist and founder director of the prizes.

The trio talk about the books that have most inspired and excited them this year, how they juggle all the books they have to read for the prizes, and what they’ve learnt as readers and as writers.

The Women’s Prize for Fiction has been running for three decades, and winners include Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Zadie Smith and Ann Patchett. The Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction was first awarded in 2024, and won by Naomi Klein for Doppelganger.

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.

Radiohead bassist Colin Greenwood’s book How to Disappear has been two decades in the making. Taking us from the stage to the rehearsal room, it illuminates the creative process of one of the 21st century’s most influential bands.

In this event, Radiohead bassist Colin Greenwood tells stories from his career and guides us through some of the candid photographs he’s taken. Greenwood has played bass in Radiohead since their formation in 1985. He has also recorded and toured with Tamino, Nick Cave and Warren Ellis and has written for publications including the Guardian and the Spectator.

Radiohead has sold more than 30 million albums worldwide. Their many accolades include six Grammy and four Ivor Novello Awards. The group were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2019 and their 1997 album OK Computer is archived in the US Library of Congress. He talks to scientist and broadcaster Adam Rutherford.

The changing world order and the movement towards a post-American world is having an effect on more than just politics. Established institutions across the West are grappling with the reordering of global power, and one of the biggest crises of confidence is in the mainstream media, which has seen trust and confidence in it rapidly erode.

Can media organisations meet the challenge of depicting and analysing a radically changed world order? Journalists Pankaj Mishra, Lydia Polgreen and Jonathan Shainin discuss how the media should approach the changing world, and what it can do to build back trust.

Mishra is an Indian essayist and novelist. His most recent book is The World After Gaza. Polgreen is a former international correspondent at the New York Times and a co-host of the Matter of Opinion podcast. Shainin founded the Guardian Long Read and was later the paper’s head of opinion and the editor of Cotton Capital, an award-winning investigation into its founders’ connections to slavery.

Novelist Gill Hornby takes us into the world of the Austen family, and introduces her latest fictionalisation of the lives of the Austens. In The Elopement, Mary Knatchbull’s life is changed when her widowed father marries Fanny Knight.

Fanny’s sisters become Mary’s first friends, and as Mary starts to bloom into a beautiful young woman, she forms a special bond with one Mr Knight in particular. Soon, they are deeply in love and determined to marry. Who would want to stand in their way?

Hornby is author of novels The Hive and All Together Now, as well as The Story of Jane Austen, a biography of Austen for young readers. Her novel Miss Austen has been adapted for screen on BBC One starring Keeley Hawes.

Poets Małgorzata Lebda and Joelle Taylor discuss the many and varied relationships between women, violence against women, and how women support one another.

Lebda’s novel Voracious follows a year in the life of a young woman caring for her dying grandmother. As her grandfather renovates a room for his wife, the women care for one another, for the plants and for the animals. Lebda is a poet with eight collections to her name. Voracious is the winner of Empik’s Best Newcomer in Poland and is shortlisted for the Angelus Prize, the Conrad Prize and the NIKE Award.

Taylor’s The Night Alphabet reveals interconnecting tales of a woman whose body is covered in tattoos. She reveals the story behind each tattoo to the artists linking all the art on her body together. It is a deep investigation into human nature and violence against women. Taylor is a queer, working class author of six plays and four collections of poetry, most recently C+nto & Othered Poems, winner of the 2022 TS Eliot Prize for Poetry and the 2022 Polari Prize.

Six occasions. Six wines. What’s the best bottle to pour in each scenario? Everyone talks about matching wine with food, but what about the situation? Time, place and people all have a huge bearing on the success of a wine. Sommelier Jane Rakison is here to navigate you through the perennial middle-class minefield – how to choose the right wine. In this tasting event she’ll talk you through her selection of six wines, and then you can try them for yourself.

An award-winning writer, broadcaster and author raised in South Wales, Jane is best known as a wine expert on BBC1’s Saturday Kitchen Live. She has penned two books, edited magazines and written columns over the years, and she loves to host events (especially at festivals). She is an international judge for both food and wine.

The Guardian’s global environment editor Jonathan Watts shares his exploration of James Lovelock, environmentalist and inventor, industrialist, NASA engineer and spy. Watts (author of When a Billion Chinese Jump: How China Will Save the World – or Destroy It) has drawn on hours of interviews, personal papers and scientific archives to paint his portrait in The Many Lives of James Lovelock.

Lovelock is best known as the father of Gaia Theory (that life on Earth is a self-sustaining system in which organisms interact with their environment for a habitable ecosystem). Pulling together the many influences which shaped his life and thinking, Watts discusses this fascinating, often contradictory man.

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

PG Wodehouse, best known for creating Jeeves and Wooster, once had a record-breaking five musicals playing simultaneously on Broadway. In Play on Words, devised and directed by Hugh Wooldridge, Wodehouse’s step-great grandson Hal Cazalet and pianist Simon Beck transport us back to the Golden Age of stage and screen through stories, anecdotes and songs.

Wodehouse’s lyrics informed the way he crafted his novels and shaped his inimitable characters, as well as helping define the American musical. Celebrate the birth of the musical, with theatrical writing highlights of the last 120 years from Gershwin, Kern, Rodgers & Hammerstein, Stephen Sondheim and more.

Cazalet is an opera singer who has created leading roles in world premieres for composers across the world. Beck has been music director and pianist for a number of artists, and for the London debut of the Broadway institution Sondheim Unplugged.

Having played most of Shakespeare’s female characters, actor Dame Harriet Walter now lets them speak their mind, going between the lines of the plays to imagine what these women were really thinking. Hear what Gertrude longed to say; why Lady Macbeth felt she should be King; how Juliet’s nurse bemoaned her loss; and what Cleopatra’s handmaidens really thought of her.

“Though Shakespeare's empathy for his female creations is miraculous, his plays mirror the hierarchy and patriarchy of his day with the result that women are seldom centre stage, have far fewer lines, and their function in the plot is always and solely in relation to a man. But not in these pages…”

Palliative care doctor Rachel Clarke tells the unforgettable and inspiring true story of how one family’s grief transformed into a lifesaving gift. Clarke blends the history of medical innovations behind transplant surgery with the stories of nine-year-olds Keira Ball and Max Johnson in this powerful event about life, death and how we honour loved ones.

After a terrible car accident, Keira suffered catastrophic brain injuries. As the rest of her body began to shut down, her heart continued to beat, and in an act of extraordinary generosity, Keira’s parents and siblings immediately agreed that she would have wanted to be an organ donor.

Meanwhile Max Johnson had been in a hospital for nearly a year, valiantly fighting the virus that was causing his young heart to fail. When Max’s parents received the call they had been hoping for, they knew it came at a terrible cost to another family.

Clarke is author of three books including Dear Life, which was shortlisted for the Costa Biography Award and longlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize.

Author Geoff Dyer reflects on his childhood and what it means to have come of age in England in the 1960s and 1970s, in a country shaped by the aftermath of the Second World War but accelerating towards change. He discusses his memoir Homework, shares stories from his youth and gives insights into his career.

Dyer is author of four novels and numerous non-fiction books, most recently The Last Days of Roger Federer.

In poet Nick Makoha’s collection The New Carthaginians, time and the world are out of joint. Through a triumvirate of characters – the Poet, a Black Icarus and a resurrected Jean-Michel Basquiat – Makoha explores a heroes’ odyssey, a new mythos in which the othering of Black life might be undone, and a transfigured understanding of myth and life.

Makoha, who discusses his work with musician and poet Roger Robinson, is a Ugandan poet and playwright. His debut collection Kingdom of Gravity was shortlisted for the Felix Dennis Prize and was one of the Guardian’s Best Books of the Year.