Hay Festival Podcast

Welcome to the Hay Festival Podcast, supported by our friends at Baillie Gifford. Each Thursday we release remixed conversations with the world's greatest writers and thinkers from our festivals around the world. Season 1 is now complete. Series 2 with another 10 sessions will be launched in July.

You can find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and wherever else you stream or download podcasts.

Social media: @hayfestival #ImagineTheWorld

S1 Ep10 Hilary Mantel

The novelist Hilary Mantel discusses The Mirror and the Light, the third book in her Thomas Cromwell trilogy with Peter Florence. The interview was recorded at Hay Festival Digital on 30 May 2020, where Hilary was awarded the Hay Festival Medal for Prose.

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S1 Ep9 Gloria Steinem & Laura Bates

The legendary and deeply inspiring writer and activist Gloria Steinem discusses her memoir The Truth Will Set You Free, But First It Will Piss You Off: Thoughts on Life, Love and Rebellion with the founder of The Everyday Sexism Project.

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S1 Ep8 Michael Morpurgo

Michael Morpurgo’s compelling Hay Library Lecture is a marvel of storytelling, an impassioned argument for the rights of every child to have access to books and education, and a celebration of his novel I Believe in Unicorns.

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S1 Ep7 Matthew Francis

Matthew Francis’ re-telling of the first four stories of the Welsh classic The Mabinogi is the first to situate it in poetry, and captures the magic and strangeness of this medieval Celtic world. Permeating the whole sequence is a delight in the power of the imagination to transform human experience into works of tragedy, comedy and wonder. Chaired by Daniel Hahn. Francis’ new poetry collection WING is out now from Faber.

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S1 Ep6 Hallie Rubenhold

A conversation with the social historian Hallie Rubenhold describing how she mined untapped Victorian sources to illuminate the stories of the women murdered by Jack the Ripper in her Baillie Gifford Prize-winning The Five.

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S1 Ep5 Caitlin Moran

A compelling and hilarious rallying call for our times from superstar journalist and author Caitlin Moran tackling topics as pressing and diverse as a women-only language, flawed heroes, and the reasons the internet is like a drunken toddler, in conversation with Stephanie Merritt.

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S1 Ep4 Judi Dench & Richard Eyre

For #WorldBookDay, the day of Shakespeare’s birth, here's actress Judi Dench talking about her Shakespearean work and celebrating her album of great speeches, Exits and Entrances.

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S1 Ep3 Yuval Noah Harari

How did humans turn themselves from hustling African apes into the rulers of planet earth? The Israeli historian and philosopher Yuval Noah Harari looks at the secrets of our success and explores the themes of his bestselling debut Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind in conversation with Rosie Boycott at Hay Festival Cartagena in January 2016.

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S1 Ep2 Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

The Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, author of Half of a Yellow Sun, Americanah and We Should All Be Feminists talks about how she discovered Gabriel García Márquez. She responds to his statement “I am a journalist above everything else” in an intriguing exploration of how imagination turns historical fact into fictional truths.

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S1 Ep1 Stephen Fry & Philippe Sands

Stephen Fry and the international human rights lawyer Philippe Sands discuss his award-winning book East West Street, a compelling family detective story and exploration of the legal principles that defined the Nuremberg War Trials. It's riveting and exacting and you'd expect that, of course. But it's also hilarious, and the laughter is the light in this deep darkness.

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