Subscribe or Log In to Anytime
Access audio & film from your favourite writers and thinkers
Give the gift of Anytime
Treat someone to a Hay Festival Anytime subscription
Please subscribe to Hay Festival Anytime for access to this content (more details)
Subscribe for £20.00 or log in if you already have a subscription
 

Mark Watson talks to Daniel Hahn

Mortification

Hay Festival 2025, 

Mark Watson is generally accepted to be alive. And yet he’s died many times. Not just on stage – though he’ll tell you about that – but in other ways, too. There’s been the death of a childhood dream. The death of his panel-show career. And then there was the time he died inside and nearly lost it all…

Revealing and painfully funny, Mark will tell us all about mortification, failure and the times life doesn’t work out as planned. But he also wisely questions whether the things we strive for – recognition, success, the approval of others – are really the things that matter. He might be talking about death, but he reminds us how to live.

Mark Watson talks to Daniel Hahn