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.

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

Social media: @hayfestival #ImagineTheWorld

Series Two

S2 Ep10 The Future of Europe

Five inspiring women writers Elif Shafak, Leila Slimani, Kapka Kassabova, Janne Teller and Hilary Cottam offer their visions for the future of Europe on the event of our digital Hay Festival Europa28.

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S2 Ep9 The Next Big Things – 10 Years of Emerging Science from the Royal Society

Royal Society Research Fellows Rachel Lowe, Gemma Modinos, Adi Kliot, Aquila Mavalankar, Nicole Grobert and Alicia El Haj discuss their work at the forefront of science.

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S2 Ep8 Theology

Desmond Tutu, Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, Gene Robinson, Marie-Elsa Bragg and Gene Robinson talk faith, tradition, conflict and hope.

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S2 Ep7 Education Education Education

Tara Westover, author of bestseller Educated, teacher and author Margaret White and Senior Director of the Global Learning Lab and author of Natural Born Learners, Alex Beard explore how we learn.

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S2 Ep6 Ageing

Journalist-politicians Joan Bakewell and Camilla Cavendish, and Sarah Harper, the Director of the Oxford Institute of Ageing, reflect on a time of super-centenarians, third and fourth ages, and what keeps us vital.

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S2 Ep5 Climate change in a time of Coronavirus

Ed Hawkins, Christiana Figueres and Tom Rivett-Carnac, Nick Stern and Gabrielle Walker give some perspective on the ways in which the pandemic is changing the term of reference for dealing with the climate crisis.

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S2 Ep4 War Poetry

A reflection on poetry and the Great War, sampling the Josephine Hart Poetry Hour and our Armistice anthology, The Echoes Last So Long with actors Eileen Atkins and Dan Stevens and poets Margaret Atwood, Tishani Doshi, Mererid Hopwood, Ulrike Almut Sandig and Owen Sheers.

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S2 Ep3 Artificial Intelligence

A very brief introduction to machine learning, neural networks, darkest fears and wild intelligence as dreamed into being by Ada Lovelace and Alan Turing. Garry Kasparov and Stephen Fry, Beth Singler, James Scott, Ian McEwan, Marcus du Sautoy, Nigel Shadbolt and Margaret Boden share insights into Artificial Intelligence, fiction and (then) fact.

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S2 Ep2 Romeo and Juliet

Could you have married your first love? Why does it matter who played Peter? What if Juliet wakes 27 lines earlier? Sarah Crossan, Germaine Greer, Abigail Rokison-Woodall, Erin Sullivan, Tahmima Anam and Stephen Fry share insights into Shakespeare’s play.

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S2 Ep1 Global Health

In this first episode of the new series we glean insight and analysis of the historical and contemporary context of Global Health, zoonotic disease and pandemics from experts including Mary Dobson, Jeremy Farrar, Thomas J Bollyky, Devi Sridhar, Chelsea Clinton and Sally Davies.

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Series One

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.

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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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