Hay Festival After hours: Cardiff

Experience Hay Festival in Cardiff – an evening where words, music and big ideas collide.

This special night gathers voices that spark imagination and push boundaries: the music of legendary Welsh songwriter Gruff Rhys; the poetry and performance of Hanan Issa, National Poet of Wales; the rhythm and fire of spoken word poet and hip hop artist DUKE AL; and a rare chance to hear from acclaimed science fiction author and activist Cory Doctorow, to challenge how we think about technology and our lives online.

Together, these artists and thinkers create a journey through song, poetry, performance, and provocation – a celebration of creativity in all its forms. Come ready to listen, question, and be inspired by a night that reveals the power of words, the pull of music and the most urgent conversations of our times.

Singer-songwriter Gruff Rhys has been releasing records since 1988 with his first band Ffa Coffi Pawb before becoming well known as the frontman of Super Furry Animals. His new record Dim Probs is a true beauty of an album. Written and performed entirely in Welsh/Cymraeg, it places the listener side by side with one of the country’s greatest and most thoughtful songwriters. Gruff will talk to singer, songwriter and actress Lisa Jên Brown about the creation of Dim Probs and play tracks from his new album.

“It takes only the first thirty seconds of ‘Pan Ddaw’r Haul I Fore’, the opening track of Gruff Rhys’ ninth solo album, to be reminded of his greatness” – John Williamson CLASH.

Hanan Issa is the National Poet of Wales. A Welsh-Iraqi poet, filmmaker and artist, her work includes the poetry collection My Body can House two Hearts; Welsh (Plural): Essays on the Future of Wales, and the children’s anthology And I Hear Dragons. Issa also writes for stage, film and television, and wrote and directed the short film The Golden Apple (2022) for Ffilm Cymru/BBC Wales.

“A fresh voice to the national conversation” – Ifor ap Glyn.

When Cory Doctorow coined the term enshittification, he wasn’t just coming up with a funnier way to say “things are getting worse”, he was making a sharp diagnosis about the state of the digital world – and how it’s corroding our lives. The American Dialect Society crowned it the 2023 Word of the Year, and it even inspired the 2025 season of Black Mirror. In his book, Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly got Worse and What to do About It he traces how the once-promising internet was colonized by platforms that dazzled us with all-but-magical promises, only to betray their users in pursuit of profit.

Cory Doctorow is a science fiction author, activist and journalist based in California and has been inducted into the Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame.

“Punchy, pungent, and utterly compelling. Enshittification will change the way you see the world, and just might change the world itself. You simply must read it” – Tim Harford.

DUKE AL is a spoken word artist and author whose work transforms rhyme into therapy. From childhood, writing poems and rap lyrics was his way of wrestling with OCD and finding escape in rhythm and flow. His performances, rooted in lived experience and powered by purpose, have been featured on the BBC, TEDx, BT Sport and FujiFilm UK.

“Sensational” – John Cooper Clarke.