Event CC01
Hay Festival presents... a night of pleasure
Yassmin Abdel-Magied, Tahmima Anam, Chris Power and Stephanie Sy-Quia
– The Conduit Club, 6 Langley St, London WC2H 9JA
Join a quartet of writers for a special evening celebrating the books that bring us joy – the ultimate book club night.
Marking the launch of the Hay Festival 2026 programme and celebrating the Festival's Pleasure List campaign for the UK National Year of Reading, this one-off event will feature readings, conversation, and spark delight.
About the speakers
Yassmin Abdel-Magied – Born in Sudan, Y.M. Abdel-Magied's first job as a teenager was in a coal mine in rural Australia. After graduating with first class honours in Mechanical Engineering, Abdel-Magied trained and worked as a MWD (Measurement While Drilling) contractor and drilling engineer across Europe, Australia, Asia and the US. AT SEA is Abdel-Magied's first adult novel.
Tahmima Anam – Author of the Bengal trilogy and a recipient of the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Book and the O. Henry Award. Her short story ‘Garments’ was shortlisted for the BBC National Short Story Award. She is a Granta Best of Young British Novelist and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Born in Dhaka, Bangladesh, she trained as an anthropologist at Harvard University and now lives in London.
Chris Power – Author of the novel A Lonely Man (a Washington Post and New Statesman book of the year) and the short story collection Mothers (longlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize, shortlisted for the Edge Hill Short Story Prize). His fiction has appeared in Granta, The Stinging Fly, The Dublin Review, and The White Review, and been broadcast on BBC Radio 4. He writes for various newspapers and magazines and can sometimes be heard presenting Radio 4’s Open Book. He lives in London.
Stephanie Sy-Quia – Born in 1995 and is based in London. Her writing and criticism have been published in The Guardian, The White Review, The Boston Review, Granta, The TLS, and others. She is a Ledbury Poetry Critic and has twice been shortlisted for the FT Bodley Head Essay Prize. Her debut Amnion, published by Granta Poetry in 2021, received a Somerset Maugham Award and was a Poetry Book Society Winter Recommendation; was longlisted for the Rathbones Folio and RSL Ondaatje Prizes; and won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. She is the recipient of an Eric Gregory Award. Her debut novel A Private Man will be published in 2026 by Picador in the UK, Grove Atlantic in the US and Suhrkamp in Germany.
