Friday 26 May 2023

Start your day with a morning yoga class designed to reinvigorate your energy and spirit. Enjoy a grounding, energising, alignment‐based yoga practice, using the breath and sound to rediscover and rejuvenate the body and mind. Beginners and experienced students are most welcome. Yoga mats and props are provided.

Please contact Kanga Wellbeing on spa@kangaevents.com for any questions relating to these classes. As capacity is limited, we recommend booking in advance to avoid disappointment.

Kanga Wellbeing will also be onsite throughout the Festival offering wellbeing and a wide range of holistic massage therapies. Therapies will be held in cosy lotus belle tents with heaters and fans. For more information or to book, please visit www.kangaevents.com/hay-festival. For enquiries, please email spa@kangaevents.com.

Guides from the Brecon Beacons National Park will lead a gentle walk through the beautiful surrounds of Hay-on-Wye. Two of the Park’s leading ecologists share their knowledge of some of the local flora and fauna. You’ll be joined by a guest from the Festival programme.

Hay-on-Wye is based within 520 square miles of beautiful landscape that makes up Bannau Brycheiniog (Brecon Beacons) 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 gentle walks will take you into the town’s local environment while offering the opportunity to learn more about the Park’s work and its treasured landscape.

Please wear appropriate footwear and outdoor gear.

Hear Dr Sian Williams talk to people who have lived through extraordinary events that have set their lives on an entirely different course. Life Changing is all about the human experience, how people deal with obstacles that turn their lives upside down. The journeys are not always straightforward and there are often some remarkable discoveries along the way.

Westminster journalists are the ultimate insiders, with privileged access to the Houses of Parliament and the people running the country. Do they work to hold the powerful to account? Or is the Lobby an opaque and cosy club that sometimes fails democracy? Katie Razzall is joined by a panel of Westminster insiders to discuss.

Guto Harri is a former Director of Communications at 10 Downing Street. His new podcast, Unprecedented, tells the story of the final months of Boris Johnson’s administration. Ian Dunt is a columnist at the i Newspaper and author of How Westminster Works... and Why It Doesn't; Caroline Wheeler is Political Editor at The Sunday Times and Eleni Courea is Deputy Editor of POLITICO London Playbook.

Two of the most famous women in history, Anne Boleyn and Queen Elizabeth I are rarely spoken about as mother and daughter. Tracy Borman, joint chief curator of Historic Royal Palaces and chief executive of the Heritage Education Trust, offers an illuminating insight into how their short-lived relationship – Elizabeth was just three when Anne was executed – had a long-term impact. Piecing together evidence from original documents and artefacts, Borman tells the story of Anne Boleyn’s relationship with, and influence over, her daughter Elizabeth and sheds new light on the two women.

Three of the most exciting voices on publisher Faber’s poetry list read from their latest collections. Kunial’s England’s Green was shortlisted for the 2023 TS Eliot Prize; its poems find the true and the timeless in the lived everyday and invite the reader to look again at the places and the language that we think we know. Laird’s Up Late is a powerful collection reflecting on the strange and chaotic times we live in; it contains a sequence meditating on a father’s dying, which won the 2022 Forward Prize for Best Single Poem. Sullivan, who won the TS Eliot Prize in 2019 for her debut Three Poems, performs from Was it for This, an exhilarating exploration of the ways in which we attempt to map our lives in space and time.

Danny Robins is joined by writer and comedian David Baddiel for a thrillingly spooky live recording of the hit BBC podcast, investigating real-life stories of the paranormal.

In 1790, whalers from Nantucket are invited to found the port of Milford Haven in west Wales. But what does the arrival of these hardy Quakers mean for the local population? And what is the meaning of the beached whale that preceded them? As two cultures clash, concern swerves into hysteria against the incomers, and a local preacher plans a grotesque, Jonah-inspired fate for the whalers. Nathan Munday, a writer and trainee minister, talks to writer and broadcaster Horatio Clare about how his novel Whaling explores our relationship with nature, the boundary between faith and superstition, and the world of immigration.

Please note - This event was originally advertised as Thursday 25 May 2023, 4pm and has now changed to the above date and time.

When the stakes are high, how low will Ayesha Scott go? The protagonist of Rothschild’s new novel has a perfect life, but behind every realised dream lurks an unexploded nightmare. In the course of one day Ayesha discovers that she will be penniless, homeless and powerless unless she can outwit the international mafia, infiltrate the world of high finance and make backstreet deals with the shadiest members of the art world. Writer, film-maker and philanthropist Hannah Rothschild speaks to journalist Rosie Boycott about High Time and how she captures humour on the page.

Our food system is one of the most successful, most innovative and most destructive industries on earth. It sustains us, but it is also killing us. Henry Dimbleby, co-founder of fast food chain Leon, creator of the National Food Strategy and author of Ravenous: How to get Ourselves and our Planet Into Shape, talks about how we can take action to make things better, drawing on health, farming, and environmental and food security.

Alexander McCall Smith’s much loved character Precious Ramotswe first came to life on the pages of The No.1 Ladies’ Detective Agency 25 years ago. Join us as we celebrate this global success. The author gives us insights into his writing career and a glimpse of the many series that have been published in the intervening years, including 44 Scotland Street series and a new novel in the Detective Varg series, The Discreet Charm of the Big Bad Wolf.

Challenge your assumptions about the origins of everything from farming to democracy with archaeologist David Wengrow. The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, a collaboration between Wengrow and the late anthropologist David Graeber, brings together the latest scholarship and archaeological evidence to tell a new story about the last 30,000 years, from the egalitarian early cities in Mexico and Mesopotamia to part-time kings and queens in Ice Age Europe. Ambitious and wide-ranging, Wengrow and Graeber’s work overturns everything you know about human behaviour. Wengrow talks to Georgina Godwin, journalist and Books Editor for Monocle 24.

As nurses and ambulance workers have gone on strike to demand better pay, conditions and protection for patients, the future of the NHS has once again come to the forefront of national concern. Join Professors Sally Moyle and Sandra Nicholson for a discussion on how, in the face of unfilled vacancies and a retention drain, we secure the future of the NHS workforce. Moyle is pro-vice chancellor for health and science at the University of Worcester, and a nurse and experienced workforce planner. Nicholson is a GP and founding dean of the Three Counties Medical School and chair of the Association for the Study of Medical Education.

Join BBC Radio Wales’ enthusiastic book club members as they review their latest read.

The author and broadcaster presents a powerful, career-spanning collection of his journalism on race, racism and Black life and death from Africa, the Caribbean, Europe and the United States. For three decades, Younge has had a ringside seat at the most significant events and personalities to impact the Black diaspora and recounts these in Dispatches From the Diaspora: accompanying Nelson Mandela on his first election campaign, joining revellers on the southside of Chicago during Obama’s victory and entering New Orleans days after hurricane Katrina. We see him with Maya Angelou in her limousine, discussing politics with Stormzy on his couch and witnessing Archbishop Desmond Tutu almost fall asleep mid-interview. He discusses how much change is possible and the power of systems to thwart those aspirations with author and educator Jeffrey Boakye.

Captivated by castles? Delighted by drawbridges? Then don’t miss Hay resident Mary Morgan and local historian Elizabeth Bingham’s talk on the violent histories of castles in and around Hay-on-Wye. The pair, who return to the Festival following last year’s popular talk on local churches, talk about Hay Castle and everything from partially ruined mottes and baileys to stone fortresses under constant threat from the Welsh, describing how some castles have adapted to a new phase in the 21st century.

Writer and comedian Josie Long takes us on a trip through her frank and funny debut story collection, Because I Don't Know What you Mean and What you Don’t, in conversation with classicist and comedian Natalie Haynes. With a cast of characters ranging from friends setting up a business to help relieve the wealthy of their guilt, to a cul-de-sac WhatsApp group with eggs to spare, these tales of the unexpected are comical, refreshing and often deeply relatable. Long won the Best Newcomer award at Edinburgh Fringe Festival and has been nominated three times for Best Show. She is a regular on BBC Radio 4 and the co-presenter of Book Shambles with Robin Ince.

Everyday Sexism Project founder Laura Bates discusses empowerment and a new system for an integrated and respectful society with her panel of guests. Author Winnie M Li exposes the abuse in the film industry in her latest book, Complicit. Sadaf Saaz is a poet, writer and women’s rights activist and Mandu Reid is the Leader of the Women's Equality Party.

Bates is a Hay Festival 2023 Thinker in Residence, questioning norms, finding new perspectives and challenging us to action. Her most recent book is Fix the System, Not the Women.

Stand-up comedian, activist and presenter David Baddiel isn’t afraid of a big question, and his latest book – The God Desire – asks one of the biggest: does God exist? Despite a lifetime of fantasising about the existence of God, Baddiel has concluded that it’s that very desire that proves God’s non-existence. With openness and vulnerability, Baddiel – whose career also includes writing novels for adults and children – contributes to one of the most ancient of debates with his trademark wit, honesty and humour.

Join actor Callum Scott Howells (It’s a Sin, Cabaret) and writer and director Luke Collins (Cappuccino, Swiped) as they present a screening of On the Black Hill, adapted from Bruce Chatwin’s 1982 novel, which tells the story of identical twin brothers who grow up on a farm in rural Wales and never leave home. Howells, nominated for a Bafta for his performance in It’s a Sin, and Collins, an award winner for his cinematography across two BBC short films, discuss Chatwin’s moving ability to explore the larger questions of the human experience and why the novel remains a classic piece of writing for the rural borderlands of Wales and England.​​ Chaired by poet Owen Sheers. The discussion will last for around 45 minutes, followed by the one-hour film screening.