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.

Please wear loose, comfortable clothing, and alert your practitioner at the start of class if you have any injuries.

Legend has it that Hay Castle was built in a day by a giantess called Matilda who hurled a stone across the Wye at the end of construction. Find out about this story and more with this entry ticket that also allows you to visit the castle as many times as you like for a year. Explore Matilda’s room, the castle’s costumes and cellars, and the Richard Booth Archive, and make your way right to the top for amazing views from the viewing platform.

This ticket allows you to visit the Castle at a time of your choice on the day selected, and also gives you entry into the 20th Century Welsh Artists exhibition on the second floor.

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 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.

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 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.

Get the story of Alexei Navalny, the man who became the sole political threat to Vladimir Putin, directly from his wife Yulia Navalnaya. Russian opposition leader, anti-corruption campaigner and political prisoner, Navalny won international recognition and respect. His many international honours included the Sakharov Prize, the European Parliament’s annual human rights prize.

In this extraordinary event, Navalnaya speaks to political strategist Alastair Campbell about her husband’s life and political fight, and his book Patriot, which he began writing after he was poisoned by the Russian security services in 2020. Patriot also contains Navalny’s prison diaries, written before his 2024 death in a brutal Siberian prison.

Gain a unique and heartfelt insight into the healing nature of our relationship with animals from Jay Griffiths, author of Wild: An Elemental Journey, Kith: The Riddle of the Childscape and Pip Pip: A Sideways Look at Time.

She discusses the evidence showing that animals can heal us, drawing on Indigenous knowledge, scientific discoveries and history to explore how animals can have a role in every level of healing, from the individual to the collective.

In conversation with writer, editor and producer Kathryn Tann, Griffiths tells stories from her new book How Animals Heal Us, including that of a pot-bellied pig who saved her owner’s life, and lions who guarded a girl from kidnappers.

Local historian Elizabeth Bingham and Hay resident Mary Morgan return to the Festival following previous years’ popular talks on local churches, castles, monuments and memorials. This year they turn to the history and workings of watermills, the world’s first source of mechanical power.

They take an illustrated look at some of the old mills near Hay, previously used for grinding grain, to give flour for bread and grist for animals, as well as for fulling cloth and making paper. Some are still working, some are ruined, and some have been restored or converted into homes, cafés or hydro-generating projects.

Is the myth that there is no Welsh art really true? Peter Lord doesn’t think so, and in a new exhibition at the National Library of Wales he’s combined his substantial collection with items from the National Art Collection at the National Library of Wales for the first time in order to tell the story of Welsh art and artists.

Lord punches back at the allegation made by Dr Llewelyn Wyn Griffith in the 1950s that there is no Welsh art, and talks through some of his collection of art and artefacts.

Lord worked for 15 years as a practising artist, and in 1986 turned to writing about Welsh art history. He has published extensively in both English and Welsh languages, broadcast on television and radio, and curated many exhibitions. His books include The Visual Culture of Wales and The Tradition.

Doctors Chris and Xand van Tulleken are delighted to invite you to their new BBC Radio 4 podcast.

In What’s Up Docs? they debate everyday health and wellbeing dilemmas and search for the best solutions. They want to make sense of the constant barrage of information we receive from newspapers, social media, and even other podcasts! They want to know whether to go for testosterone replacement OR how to avoid heavy metals in our diets, how can they get more willpower and what can they do about dodgy knees. And can they get rid of bad breath?!

Together with a guest expert, they examine the latest research, psychological insights, and data. In this episode, prepare to cheer up as they explore the science of the smile.

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 Gavin & Stacey's writer and performer team – James Corden and Ruth Jones – as they tell the backstage story of this multi-award-winning BBC show and how its audience grew from 500,000 to 23 million. In this exclusive Hay Festival event, the pair talk to Hay Festival Global Chair Jay Hunt about the show's origins, its meteoric rise, and that epic Christmas special, as well as sharing insights into their 25-year friendship, working relationship. Together they have written When Gavin Met Stacey and Everything in Between: A Story of Love and Friendship, out later this year.

The anthropologist and broadcaster sheds fresh light on how people have lived in Britain, by examining the stories of the dead. Her three books on burial, Ancestors, Buried and Crypt, revive characters from the past, starting with the earliest Britons and journeying through the Roman occupation and on to the Middle Ages.

From the murky world of prehistory to Roman graveside feasts, and from richly furnished Anglo Saxon graves to a pit of murdered Vikings, she shows that the information we can extract from archaeological human remains represents an essential tool for understanding our own history.

Professor Alice Roberts was a presenter on Channel 4’s Time Team, and went on to write and present The Incredible Human Journey, Origins of Us and Ice Age Giants on BBC2. She is also presenter of Digging for Britain.

Artists and activists Led By Donkeys share the journey of their five years of resistance against those in power in Britain.

Led By Donkeys was founded in early 2019 when four friends, motivated by the “thermonuclear hypocrisy of our political overlords”, started going out at night to paste up guerrilla billboards of the leading Brexiters’ historic tweets. Mixing art and activism, they have created some of the most memorable images of our political age, and continue to protest. Hear directly from the group, and be inspired to take your own political action. They talk to writer Oliver Bullough.

Joanne Harris returns to the world of Chocolat with the long-awaited story of Vianne. Twenty-five years after the publication of the Whitbread-shortlisted novel – adapted for film starring Juliette Binoche and Johnny Depp – the author discusses her prequel, set six years before Vianne opens her scandalous chocolaterie in the small French village of Lansquenet.

Sylviane Rochas scatters her mother’s ashes in New York and lets the changing wind blow her to the French seaside town of Marseille. For the first time in her life, Vianne holds the future in her own hands. As she discovers the joy of cooking for the first time, making recipes her own with the addition of bittersweet spices, she realises that it possesses its own, dangerous magic in this town full of secrets…

If you think the outlook is bleak, come and hear some much-needed new perspective on our prospects as Isabel Losada and Sumit Paul-Choudhury discuss their good vibes with Director of Positive News Martin Wright.

In The Joyful Environmentalist Losada gets right on with the solutions. Looking for every single way we can take care of the planet, she addresses how we live and work, travel, shop, eat, drink, dress, vote, play, volunteer, bank – everything. She advocates doing this wholeheartedly, energetically and joyfully, until we’re all fully equipped to be part of the pollution solution.

Astrophysicist-turned-journalist Sumit Paul-Choudhury’s The Bright Side is a deep dive into the power and science of optimism. Irrational though it might seem, optimism is central to the human psyche: without it we would never have survived the unpredictable and often hostile world we evolved into – and it may have lessons for us yet.

In these uncertain times, we might all sit there and want things to change, but how many of us get off the sofa and try to make that change happen?

Rachel Burden brings BBC Radio 4’s virtual Café Hope to Hay Festival, welcoming special guests who have made a difference to their community and changed it for the better in big or small ways. You’ll be inspired hearing the highs and lows of how it all happened and their driving force.

At a time when the news we hear every day can leave us feeling hopeless, Café Hope celebrates amazing individual stories – a reminder that just one person can make a huge difference. Bring a brew and we’ll bring the hope.

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.