Fiction

Author James Cahill considers art, artists and selling out in this discussion with Hay Festival President Stephen Fry. Cahill’s new novel The Violet Hour follows Thomas Haller, who has achieved the kind of fame that most artists only dream of, but the vision he presents of being an untouchable genius at the top of his game is a lie.

On the eve of his latest show, the luminaries of the art world gather. But a chain of events begins that will lead the friends back into the past, to confront who they have become. The Violet Hour exposes the unsettling underbelly of the art world, asking questions about who is granted admission and who is left outside.

Cahill has worked in the art world and academia for 15 years. His debut novel, Tiepolo Blue, was shortlisted for the Authors’ Club Best First Novel Award.

The bestselling authors Tracy Chevalier (Girl with a Pearl Earring) and SJ Parris (Alchemy) compare notes on writing spellbinding historical fiction.

Chevalier’s The Glassmaker is set in Venice, 1486, where Orsola Rosso flouts the convention barring women from glassmaking, to save her family from ruin. She knows her creations must be perfect to be accepted by men – but will she ever earn the respect of those closest to her? Parris’ Traitor’s Legacy takes us to England in 1598, when a young heiress is found murdered at the theatre. Queen Elizabeth’s spymaster calls upon former agent Sophia de Wolfe to investigate, but her quest soon takes her into dangerous waters.

Prepare for brutal honesty and lots of laughter as friends Kathy Lette and Ruby Wax discuss growing older, the problems and joys of being a feminist of a certain age, and how to deal with life-changing events.

The pair, who met in the 1990s, look at their work and lives, and give a glimpse into their friendship. Lette’s latest book HRT: Husband Replacement Therapy is an outrageously funny, heartbreaking novel about a woman who is diagnosed with cancer on the eve of her 50th birthday, and who decides to start living instead of complying.

Lette has written 20 books and has recently completed a tour of her one-woman show, Girls Night Out. Wax is a comedian, performer and bestselling author who also campaigns on mental health.

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time author weaves ancient fables into fresh, unexpected forms and forges new unforgettable legends, reimagining stories from Laika the Soviet space dog on her fateful orbit to St Anthony wrestling with loneliness in the desert.

The myth of the Minotaur in his labyrinth becomes a wrenching parable of maternal love – and of the monstrosities of patriarchy. Actaeon, changed into a stag after glimpsing the naked Diana and torn to pieces by his hunting dogs, becomes a visceral metaphor about how humans use and misuse animals. From genetic engineering to the eternal complications of family, Haddon shows us that we’re subject to the same elemental forces that obsessed the Greeks.

Come and listen to this year’s celebrated Hay Festival Writers at Work. This thrilling 2025 group of ten Welsh writers will share new fiction and poetry, in English and Cymraeg.

The author of The Lamplighters introduces her suspenseful new novel. The Sunshine Man is the story of a terrible crime that shakes a community, and of a revenge plotted over decades.

Birdie Keller wakes up one freezing January morning to hear that her sister’s killer has been freed from jail. Birdie leaves for London with a pistol and a plan: to find this man and make him pay. She’s been waiting two decades to get him, biding her time: here, at last, revenge. But Jimmy Maguire, the man she’s after, knew Birdie a long time ago, in a life she’d sooner forget. They’ve got history, and he isn’t the only one with a secret.

Come and listen to this year’s celebrated Hay Festival Writers at Work. This thrilling 2025 group of ten Welsh writers will share new fiction and poetry, in English and Cymraeg.

Booker-longlisted debut novelist Yael van der Wouden talks to bestselling author Tracy Chevalier (Girl With a Pearl Earring) about twisted desire, histories and homes in The Safekeep.

Fifteen years after the Second World War, and Isabel has built herself a solitary life of discipline and strict routine in her late mother’s country home, with not a fork or a word out of place. But all is upended when her brother Louis delivers his graceless new girlfriend, Eva, at Isabel’s doorstep – as a guest, there to stay for the season… In the sweltering heat of summer, Isabel’s desperate need for control reaches boiling point. What happens between the two women leads to a revelation which threatens to unravel all she has ever known.

Come to the Family Garden for a pizza masterclass with Kitchen Garden Pizza. In this one-hour session your imagination and creativity will be fed along with your belly! You’ll get your hands messy with freshly grown and foraged ingredients, make and top your own dough and observe the pizzaioli at work at the wood-fired oven.

Dairy-free and gluten-free options available.

Two contemporary writers discuss the power and playfulness of language, and introduce their new novels, with critic and author Stephanie Merritt.

Natasha Brown’s Universality is about a journalist who sets out to uncover the truth after a man is bludgeoned with a solid gold bar on a Yorkshire farm. It’s a celebration of the force of language from the Granta Best of Young British Novelist 2023 and Observer Best Debut Novelist 2021. Her debut novel Assembly was Foyles Fiction Book of the Year.

Coe’s The Proof of my Innocence is a political critique wrapped up in a murder mystery that involves an almost 40-year-old literary enigma. He is the award-winning author of 14 novels, including The Rotters’ Club and Middle England.

Novelists Tessa Hadley and Rachel Joyce discuss their new work about sibling relationships and the hairline cracks that can appear in them, with critic and author Stephanie Merritt.

Hadley introduces her new novella The Party, which sees sisters Moira and Evelyn on the cusp of adulthood. When they meet two men with an intriguing air of sophistication, and are invited to a party, the sisters learn things about themselves and each other that shock them. Hadley is a winner of the prestigious Windham Campbell Prize for Fiction. Her stories appear regularly in the New Yorker.

In Joyce’s The Homemade God, family is everything – but as Goose and his three sisters search for answers about the death of their famous artist father, the things they learn about themselves, him and their new stepmother drive them apart before they can figure out his legacy. Joyce is author of The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, shortlisted for the Commonwealth Book Prize, longlisted for the Man Booker Prize and adapted for film in 2023.

Few contemporary authors are as adept as Jojo Moyes at combining intimate family stories with big emotions and topics, and her latest novel is no exception. Moyes introduces We All Live Here, a story of family and love that follows Lila Kennedy, who is dealing with a broken marriage, two wayward daughters, a house that is falling apart and an elderly stepfather who seems to have quietly moved in.

So when her real dad, who ran off to Hollywood 35 years before, turns up at her doorstep, it feels like the final straw. But Lila soon realises that even the family you thought you could never forgive might have something to teach you.

Moyes’ books include Me Before You, The One Plus One and The Giver of Stars.

Sanam Mahloudji was born in Tehran and grew up in Los Angeles after leaving Iran during the Islamic Revolution. Her fiction has won a Pushcart Prize. She discusses her first novel with the Malaysian author of Five Star Billionaire, Tash Aw, winner of the Whitbread First Novel Award and twice longlisted for the Man Booker Prize.

A riotously funny and moving debut, The Persians follows five women from three generations of a once illustrious Iranian family as their lives are turned upside down. In Iran, they were somebodies. In America, they’re nobodies. Can they restore the family name to its former glory? And what does that mean in a country where they never mattered to anyone?

Award-winning author Tash Aw introduces his new novel The South, the first in an extraordinary quartet exploring the lives of a family navigating huge changes in the world. The South follows Jay as he travels south to rural Malaysia with his family, there working on the land and forming a charged connection with Chuan, the son of the farm’s manager.

Aw discusses his sweeping and intimate novel, writing a reimagined epic for our times, and how his own experiences influenced the book. He is author of four novels, including We, the Survivors and a memoir of a Chinese-Malaysian family, Strangers on a Pier. His work has won the Whitbread and Commonwealth Prizes and twice been longlisted for the Booker Prize.

Join acclaimed writers and longstanding friends Kate Mosse and Jacqueline Wilson for an intimate chat encompassing their thoughts on life, writing and creative inspiration.

Both writers of strong female characters, the pair also share a sense of adventure in real life. Far from resting on their publishing laurels, Mosse recently toured a one-woman show of Labyrinth, while Wilson has just published Think Again, her first adult novel in a career spanning five decades. Similarly Mosse will also be publishing her first book for a young adult audience later this year.

They discuss revisiting characters many years after first creating them, how books can take on a life of their own, in adaptations and otherwise, and give insights into how their writing life changed following the success of their books. Mosse is founder director of the Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction and Women’s Prize for Fiction, for which Wilson has been a judge.

Writer and filmmaker Xiolu Guo reimagines Moby-Dick from the perspective of a cross-dressed female sailor, in her latest work. Call Me Ishmaelle looks afresh at the epic battle between man and nature in Herman Melville’s great novel, through the eyes of a woman.

In 1843 Ishmaelle is born in a small village on the stormy Kent coast where she grows up swimming with dolphins. Later, abandoned and desperate for a life at sea, she disguises herself as a cabin boy and travels to New York, where she boards the Nimrod, a whaling ship led by the obsessive Captain Seneca.

Through the bloody male violence of whaling, and the unveiling of her feminine identity, Ishmaelle realises there is a mysterious bond between herself and the mythical white whale. Guo discusses her dramatically different, feminist narrative that stands alongside the original while offering a powerful exploration of nature, gender and human purpose.

Kit de Waal is author of My Name is Leon, which was adapted for BBC Two, and The Trick to Time, which was longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction. In this event she discusses her writing career and her luminous new novel.

Join Robert Harris, pre-eminent writer of page-turning thrillers – most recently Precipice – as he casts a retrospective eye over his work on page and screen and shares insights into his current projects.

Nine of Harris’s bestsellers have been adapted for cinema and television, from Fatherland to Enigma and Archangel. For The Ghost Writer and An Officer and a Spy, Harris co-wrote the screenplays with director Roman Polanski. Most recently, his 2016 novel Conclave was adapted for cinema – the film came out to acclaim in 2024, starring Ralph Fiennes and Stanley Tucci.

Exploring the relationship between author, book and screen, Harris reveals the high points and the pitfalls of adapting books for film.

Sarah Harman’s debut novel won the Lucy Cavendish Fiction Prize in 2023. Harman is a recovering journalist with over a decade of experience reporting on major breaking news around the world. She discusses her course change into fiction with Kiran Millwood-Hargrave, award-winning author of The Girl of Ink & Stars and Leila and the Blue Fox.

All the Other Mothers Hate Me is a witty novel about fitting in and starting over. Florence knows all about failure. After a dismal end to her 2000s girlband career, she’s moping around West London, single, broke and unfulfilled. The only things she’s proud of are her increasingly elaborate nail art choices – and her ten-year-old son, Dylan. But when Alfie, Dylan’s bitter class rival and the child heir to a frozen foods empire, mysteriously vanishes on a school trip, Dylan becomes a prime suspect, and Florence has to get her act together…

In 1995, the London Review of Books ran the cover line ‘Was Jane Austen gay?’ Many people were horrified, including Terry Castle, the literary critic whose essay about Austen’s letters to her sister, Cassandra, led to the uproar. Castle hadn’t actually claimed this, but had examined ‘the primitive adhesiveness – and underlying eros – of the sister-sister bond’.

To mark Austen’s 250th birthday, the LRB returns to Castle’s essay in the latest of the magazine’s series of ‘live essays’. Actors will read from Castle’s piece and the texts it interrogates – Austen’s letters, novels, her nephew’s family memoir, her lesbian contemporary Anne Lister’s diaries – and consider the backlash.

A live musical counterpoint accompanies the readings, arranged by Isobel Waller-Bridge, whose works include the score for the 2020 film version of Emma starring Anya Taylor-Joy.

The Climate Fiction Prize, in its inaugural year, celebrates the best fiction engaging with the climate crisis, offering readers new responses and ways of exploring the biggest story of our time.

In this event the winner of the first ever Climate Fiction Prize, to be announced in mid-May, will speak to novelist, poet and playwright Owen Sheers. They’ll examine what we mean by ‘climate fiction’ as an expanding literary space, the power of fiction in tackling the crisis, and the vital role the wider arts play in its solution. They’ll explore the ways in which fiction enables society to comprehend the impacts of climate change and manifest responses to combat apathy and doomism.

The short list is:

The Ministry of Time, by Kaliane Bradley

And So I Roar, by Abi Daré

Briefly Very Beautiful, by Roz Dineen

Orbital, by Samantha Harvey

The Morningside, by Téa Obreht

Two of Britain’s best-known broadcasters discuss their new crime novels and how their own careers have influenced their books, murders excepted.

Writer and Anglican priest Coles’s new book is A Death on Location, in which he returns to the village of Champton as a glamorous movie set takes over the area. As actors don their bonnets, gowns and crowns, a murder interrupts filming.

In journalist Vine’s Murder on Line One, late night radio talk show host Edward Temmis is let go from his job. Cast adrift, he finds himself helping Stevie, whose grandmother, a devoted listener, died in a suspicious fire. Working together, the pair discover Stevie’s grandmother wasn’t the only one of Edward’s listeners targeted.

Authors Agustina Bazterrica and Hari Kunzru reunite for a conversation they started at Hay Festival Arequipa, Peru in 2024 as part of the Hay Festival and British Council’s Equity Series that pairs authors from the UK and around the world.

Argentinian novelist Bazterrica’s The Unworthy is a disturbing dystopian novel about the House of the Sacred Sisterhood – the only refuge available after the world has collapsed – and the resentments of the women who live there. Kunzru’s Red Pill is about Jay, a rising star of the London art scene who was once tipped for greatness, but now lives out of his car and earns money delivering groceries, while a terrible pandemic rages.

The pair talks to Toby Lichtig, fiction and politics editor of the Times Literary Supplement.

One of Wales’ best-known musicians, Jamie Morrison, talks about turning his hand to fiction with his semi-autobiographical novel Wonderboy and The Life & Times of Drewford Alabama.

The book follows Andrew ‘Pop’ Morrison, who hits the big time with his band. But when his partying lifestyle takes a dramatic downward turn, the only thing he finds comfort in is the personal diary of Drewford Alabama. With only a name and mysterious messages on an empty page, will he ever find him?

Morrison is a musician, songwriter and producer, best known as the drummer in Welsh band Stereophonics. In his teens, he formed the band Noisettes and had worldwide success. Since 2017 he has been part of a new project called 86TVs, featuring The Maccabees siblings Hugo, Felix and Will White.

A celebration of Gabriel García Márquez’s iconic novel One Hundred Years of Solitude. The Colombian novelist was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982.

Translator Daniel Hahn discusses the book, its recent screen adaptation and all things in between with New Yorker staff writer Jon Lee Anderson, who has reported extensively from Latin America and is a board member of the Gabriel García Márquez Foundation, and Colombian writer and journalist Silvana Paternostro, author of Solitude & Company, a book about Márquez as seen by the people who knew him best.

Come and listen to this year’s celebrated Hay Festival Writers at Work. This thrilling 2025 group of ten Welsh writers will share new fiction and poetry, in English and Cymraeg.

Son of John le Carré and acclaimed novelist Nick Harkaway leads us into an extraordinary, thrilling return to the world of the spymaster. Karla’s Choice is set in the missing decade between two iconic George Smiley novels, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.

It’s spring 1963 and George Smiley has left the Circus. Among the wreckage of the West’s spy war with the Soviets, he has eyes only on a more peaceful life. But Control has other plans. Smiley reluctantly agrees to one last task – but soon finds himself entangled in a perilous mystery…

The author of The Midnight Library and How to Stop Time introduces his new novel The Life Impossible, a story of wild adventure and deep transformation.

When retired maths teacher Grace is left a run-down house on a Mediterranean island by a long-lost friend, curiosity gets the better of her. She arrives in Ibiza with a one-way ticket, no guidebook and no plan.

Lee Durrell, wife of the late Gerald Durrell, speaks to author and screenwriter Tiffany Murray about a new book on her husband, telling the unvarnished story of his life. Myself & Other Animals, edited and introduced by Lee, brings together unpublished autobiographies, uncollected pieces and previously published extracts from Durrell’s work and archives.

The book draws on a memoir that Durrell started writing before he became too ill to continue it, and an unfinished book from a trip to Australia in 1969 to the Great Barrier Reef, Northern Territory and Queensland.

Gerald Durrell’s first television programme, Two in the Bush, which documented his travels to New Zealand, Australia and Malaya was made in 1962. He went on to make 70 programmes about his trips around the world, and wrote several books about his work and life.

One of Australia’s most celebrated writers bends fiction, essay and memoir to tell the story of a young woman, her relationship and her fascination with Virginia Woolf. Set in 1986, Michelle de Kretser’s Theory & Practice follows a woman who arrives in Melbourne to research the novels of Woolf. In bohemian St Kilda she meets artists, activists, students – and Kit, who claims to be in a ‘deconstructed’ relationship. Meanwhile, a dismaying discovery throws her work on ‘the Woolfmother’ into disarray.

De Kretser, who has won multiple awards including the 2023 Folio Prize, talks to Toby Lichtig, fiction and politics editor of the Times Literary Supplement, about a book that examines what happens when life smashes into art.

William Rayfet Hunter’s dazzling novel Sunstruck explores race, status and the parts of ourselves we risk losing when we fall in love.

Sunstruck follows a young man as he spends the summer with the Blake siblings: his carefree friend Lily, her rebellious younger sister Dot and the handsome and charismatic Felix. But when summer fades and the group returns to London, the cracks in the Blakes’ careful façade begin to show.

Hunter’s book won the #Merky Books New Writers' Prize 2022. They talk to author, activist and journalist Shon Faye.

Get a behind-the-scenes look at what it’s really like to judge one of the most beloved book prizes in the world. Kit de Waal (My Name is Leon) and Kavita Puri (Partition Voices), who are chairing the 2025 Women’s Prize for Fiction and Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction panels respectively, join Kate Mosse, novelist and founder director of the prizes.

The trio talk about the books that have most inspired and excited them this year, how they juggle all the books they have to read for the prizes, and what they’ve learnt as readers and as writers.

The Women’s Prize for Fiction has been running for three decades, and winners include Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Zadie Smith and Ann Patchett. The Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction was first awarded in 2024, and won by Naomi Klein for Doppelganger.