Hay Festival 2019 Programme

All her life Georgina Jones has been inspired to ignite a spark in people. From singing on stage, to running teams, coaching or spending five minutes brightening up the day of a stranger Georgina loves turning people’s lights on. Whether in businesses, communities or online it is Georgina’s life goal to inspire people so that they inspire others and become happier, and more successful and confident in the process. Georgina has become a successful entrepreneur from creating businesses that centre around her passion and that passion drives her to dream big and make a difference.

Participants will work in practical ways as actors and directors to build their confidence and enjoyment and gain a deeper understanding of the play Romeo and Juliet. Using tried and tested RSC methods this workshop will help develop knowledge and understanding of characters, plot, language and themes in some key scenes studied at Key Stage 4.

15+ years 

Join The Phoenix comic artist Karen Rubins for her comic-creation sessions! As the scribbler of all things creepy and spooky, Karen will guide you through a world of comic monsters. Learn some top comic-creating tips while she helps you to draw your own ghosts, mythical beasts and of course…some pie!

7+ years

A reading by the National Poet of Wales and the Poet Laureate of Great Britain.

The Catholics of Elizabethan England did not witness a golden age. Their Mass was banned, their priests were outlawed, their faith was criminalised. In an age of assassination and Armada, those Catholics who clung to their faith were increasingly seen as the enemy within. It is a tale of dawn raids and daring escapes, stately homes and torture chambers, ciphers, secrets and lies. Chaired by SJ Parris.

The authors of A Change of Appetite – Where Delicious Meets Healthy and A Modern Way to Eat discuss how we might change our relationship with food and diet with the chair of London Food.

Discover how your family can get gardening for wildlife and discover a secret world. Ask the experts as they share their ideas and experiences. Author Kate Bradbury is joined by 12-year-old wildlife blogger Findlay Wilde and Jane Richmond from the National Botanic Gardens of Wales. The Director of RSPB Cymru, Katie-Jo Luxton, is in the chair.

Five organisations shortlisted for the Future Dragons’ Den will tell their stories, practise their pitches and share ideas on how they’d use the £5,000 prize from Social Enterprise funders UnLtd, if they won the Den.

Daniel is one of the UK’s most popular tellers of traditional stories. Here he tells tales from the timeless collection of magical fairytales. Expect impossible quests, mysterious strangers,sudden jumps, dramatic twists, moments of high drama and low comedy…
7+ years

Join The Phoenix comic artist Karen Rubins for her comic-creation sessions! As the scribbler of all things creepy and spooky, Karen will guide you through a world of comic monsters. Learn some top comic-creating tips while she helps you to draw your own ghosts, mythical beasts and of course…some pie!

7+ years

BIG TEETH! BUBBLES! BATHROOM CHAOS! When a family of sharks pops out of the plughole, Dulcie must figure out a way to keep them from eating her up. Cue utter silliness, sea creatures and some crazy cartooning with Sarah McIntyre.

5+ years

Join The Phoenix comic artist Karen Rubins for her comic-creation sessions! As the scribbler of all things creepy and spooky, Karen will guide you through a world of comic monsters. Learn some top comic-creating tips while she helps you to draw your own ghosts, mythical beasts and of course…some pie!

7+ years

As the Allied troops stormed the D-Day beaches, the Vercors rose up to fight the Nazis in a planned rearguard action. It was to prove not only the largest Resistance action of the entire war but also, in the severity of the German response, the most brutal slaughter of resistance forces in Western Europe.

On 4 July 2012, the ATLAS and CMS experiments at CERN announced the discovery of a new particle – the Higgs boson, intimately involved with the unification of two fundamental forces and with the origin of mass itself. This is the story of that discovery: the amazing machines, the people, the science, the politics, and the consequences.

Our choices regarding what we eat involve every essential aspect of our human nature: the animal, the sensuous, the social, the cultural, the creative, the emotional and the intellectual. Thinking seriously about food requires us to consider our relationship to nature, to our fellow animals, to each other and to ourselves. So can thinking about food teach us about being virtuous, and can what we eat help us to decide how to live? The philosopher is joined by the Michelin-starred chef-patron of The Walnut Tree. They talk to John Mitchinson.

Part epic of Texas, part classic coming-of-age story, part unflinching portrait of the bloody price of power, Meyer’s The Son is an utterly transporting novel that maps the legacy of violence in the American West through the lives of the McCulloughs, an ambitious family as resilient and dangerous as the land they claim. In Spalding’s The Purchase a young Quaker father and widower leaves his home in Pennsylvania to establish a new life. He sets out with two horses, a wagon full of belongings, his five children, a 15-year-old orphan wife, and a few land warrants for his future homestead. When Daniel suddenly trades a horse for a young slave, Onesimus, it sets in motion a struggle in his conscience that will taint his life forever.