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, Jennifer Nadel an award winning journalist, activist and founder of the Compassion in Politics 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!

Get your Hay day off to a brilliant start with our daily Ready, Steady, Music workshops! With different activities each day, these interactive, fun-filled sessions for mini musicians and their grown-ups will have you tapping sticks, roaring like dinosaurs, flying with unicorns, dancing with scarves, playing with parachutes and so much more. Come and meet our puppets, explore our range of instruments and listen to the beautiful sound of the cello.

Captivating young imaginations and creating lasting memories, these sessions offer a unique musical adventure. The perfect way to boost wellbeing, increase confidence, spark creativity and introduce children to the joy of music.

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.

Battles, borders, books and breakfast! Come and explore Hay Castle with its director Tom True, who will introduce the history and invite you to get to know some of the characters from the castle’s past. He’ll also talk about running Hay Castle for the past three years.

Coffee and pastry included in the ticket price. Meet in the Great Hall.

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.

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.