Hay Festival 2025 Full Programme

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.

A chance to hear novelist and playwright Hanif Kureishi – who will join us digitally – speak about the devastating fall which left him without the use of his limbs, and the effect it had on his creativity. Kureishi fell at home on Boxing Day in 2022, and spent the subsequent year in hospitals in Italy, before he returned home to London.

Unable to hold a pen but compelled to write during his time in medical care, he dictated his words to family members, and authored a series of dispatches from his hospital beds. These were shared on social media and online, and form part of his book Shattered. The author (on screen via digital link) speaks to journalist Rosie Boycott (present in person) about his experiences, and how his time in recovery awoke within him new feelings of gratitude, humility and love.

Grab a backstage pass to Britpop’s Greatest Hits. When Miranda Sawyer interviewed Noel Gallagher in 1995, his gag wishing Damon Albarn would die of AIDS became front-page news. The journalist and author explores that mid-90s moment when British music suddenly meant everything, when Jarvis Cocker became a national hero, Trainspotting was a global hit and fire-starting seemed like a good night out.

Travel back to the beating heart of the 1990s and relive the mad exhilaration of what it was like to hear Britpop – Oasis, Blur, Tricky, Pulp, Underworld, Manic Street Preachers, The Prodigy, Suede, Chemical Brothers, Garbage, Supergrass, Radiohead, PJ Harvey and more – for the very first time.

Sawyer discusses Uncommon People with writer and Guardian literary critic Chris Power.

She’s been called one of “the internet’s best left-wing thinkers” by the Spectator. Journalist and leading political commentator Ash Sarkar is a contributing editor of Novara Media, and regularly appears on panels including Question Time, The Moral Maze, Good Morning Britain and Jeremy Vine on 5.

In Minority Rule she exposes how a strategic misdirection of blame by real minority elites is keeping the majority divided, from how identity politics has been warped and weaponised, to how an epidemic of ‘microevent’ media coverage is poisoning our information environment and stoking fear and panic in society. She talks to author and Professor of Human Geography at the University of Oxford, Danny Dorling.

Winner of the Un Certain Regard prize at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival and nominated for 12 British Independent Film Awards, How to Have Sex is a vibrant and authentic depiction of the agonies, ecstasies and ride-or-die glory of young female friendship, from rising British filmmaker Molly Manning Walker.

Three British teenage girls go on a rites-of-passage holiday, drinking, clubbing and hooking up in what should be the best summer of their lives. As they dance their way across the sun-drenched streets of Malia, they find themselves navigating the complexities of sex, consent and self-discovery.

Captured with luminous visuals and a pitch-perfect soundtrack, Manning Walker’s directorial debut paints a painfully familiar portrait of young adulthood, and how first sexual experiences should – or shouldn’t – play out.

“It launches not one but two of the most promising talents to arrive in movie theatres for a long while. Writer and director Molly Manning Walker is the complete package... And the film’s star, Mia McKenna-Bruce, is a revelation” – The Observer

Neuroscientist Russell Foster and comedian Ruby Wax discuss one of the most important contributors to our health: sleep. The pair take a look at society’s obsession with getting the ‘perfect’ night of sleep, and why a one-size-fits-all approach to sleep doesn’t work, with Foster sharing popular theories about why we sleep and busting myths about how much sleep we need at different ages.

Foster and Wax also cover topics including sleep anxiety, the effects of not getting the sleep we need, and why good sleep is different for each person.

Foster is a circadian neuroscientist, studying the sleep cycles of the brain. He is author of Life Time, a book about the body clock. Wax is a mental health campaigner and comedian whose latest tour, I’m Not As Well As I Thought I Was, is based on her book of the same name.

We’re all getting poorer. What does that look like for British children and their life chances? Social scientist Danny Dorling’s highly original approach constructs seven ‘average’ children from millions of statistics – each child symbolising the middle of a parental income bracket. Born in 2018, when the UK faced its worst inequality since the Great Depression and became Europe’s most socially divided nation, these ‘children’ turned five in 2023, amid a devastating cost-of-living crisis.

Getting to the heart of post-pandemic Britain’s most pressing issues, Dorling asks: what do we miss when we focus only on the super-rich and the most deprived? Who are today’s real middle class? And how can we reverse the trends leaving all children worse off than their parents?

Dorling is the 1971 Professor of Geography at the University of Oxford. His books include Inequality and the 1% and All That is Solid.

In conversation with Jane Davidson, Pro Vice-Chancellor Emeritus at the University of Wales Trinity Saint David and the author of #futuregen: Lessons from a Small Country.

Join some Wise, Witty and Wonderful Women for a celebration of 75 years of Woman’s Hour, featuring personal stories, humorous observations and a strong opinion or two. Author Una McCormack joins Woman’s Hour presenters Jane Garvey and Nuala McGovern and former cricketer Ebony Rainford-Brent.

For 75 years, the BBC Radio 4 programme has brought us the most iconic and inspirational women from all over the world, delving into their lives and opinions, desires and lessons to others. McCormack’s Woman’s Hour: Daily Meditations from Wise, Witty and Wonderful Women brings together fresh insights, alternative perspectives and daring ideas from remarkable women, including Rosamund Pike, Jacqueline Wilson, Nina Simone, Annie Lennox, Toni Morrison, Philippa Perry, Sandi Toksvig, Malala Yousafzai and Emma Thompson.

Writers Meg Clothier and Dan Richards examine the fascinating worlds of the shipping forecast and nocturnal adventures on land and sea in this lively discussion.

Clothier’s The Shipping Forecast celebrates a century of the essential, though also soporific, BBC Radio 4 broadcast that keeps us in tune with the gloriously fickle British weather. She explores our maritime history, from stormy weather up above to the seabed far below, and from fishing boats and battleships to the songs and poems inspired by the forecast.

Richards (host of BBC Radio 4’s Only After Dark) leads us on an exploration of the night – the nocturnal world, insomnia, the people and services that keep the modern world safe and moving, and the creative potential of the dark hours. His Overnight: Journeys, Conversations and Stories After Dark seeks out and celebrates the workers, wildlife and stories of the night.