Hay Festival 2024

How do stories start? Where can we find them? And how do we know whether or not what we’ve written is even good enough? Sarah Crossan, award-winning author of The Weight of Water, Apple and Rain, will lead you in a series of poetry and prose exercises designed to build confidence and get your pen moving. This workshop is for all writers, from beginners to experienced.

Please bring your own notebook and pen or pencil to this event.

An opportunity to get crafting! Activities differ every day, including everything from print-making to junk modelling with recycled materials. Get messy and creative: your imagination is the limit.

Book for the session and you can drop in at any point during the 1.5 hour duration. Accompanying adults: please stay in attendance at all times, but you do not require a ticket.

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. And while you wait for your pizza to cook, you can decorate your own pizza box!
Dairy-free and gluten-free options available

Enjoy a half-hour open air performance by the Brecon-based choir, with songs inspired by the Nonsense Alphabets of Edward Lear. Lear’s alphabet verses are the perfect size and shape for rounds and ditties, and have been set to music by the choir’s leader, jazz musician Rod Paton. This fun and frolicking performance will be supported by the original improvisations of cellist Sonia Hammond and various other jazzy instruments.

As a Bolton teenager with a paper round, Clive Myrie read all the newspapers he delivered from cover to cover and dreamed of becoming a journalist. Now with a long standing career in reporting, the BBC news anchor, award-winning presenter and host of Mastermind tells how his family history has influenced his view of the world. He introduces his Windrush generation parents, a great grandfather who helped build the Panama Canal, and a great uncle who became a prominent detective in Jamaica. He reflects on how being Black has affected his perspective on issues he’s encountered in thirty years reporting on some of the biggest stories of our time.

His novel One Day (recently adapted for Netflix) was an international publishing phenomenon and the iconic love story for a generation, while Us placed him on the Man Booker Prize long list. His latest novel, You Are Here, is a love story which unfolds on a walk across the north of England. It’s the story of two lonely people, both a little lost and wary of new company. But, over many miles, as they start to talk and share stories, the possibility of a new beginning opens up before them. Witty and thoughtful as ever, David Nicholls talks to BBC broadcaster Samira Ahmed about first encounters, second chances and finding the way home.

Two professional women discuss the triple-whammy of discrimination faced by women over 50 in work: they are not male, young or linear in their career paths. As a result, they are leaving corporate life, and taking their abundant wisdom, energy and ambition with them.

Leadership coach Dr Lucy Ryan conducted a unique doctoral research project into professional women at midlife. In her book Revolting Women, she argues that assumptions about declining midlife motivation and energy are often not true for women, highlights why women walk out of corporate life and shows how businesses can retain and develop this invaluable talent pool. Dorothy Byrne, President of Murray Edwards College, Cambridge (a college for women), was previously Head of News and Current Affairs at Channel 4, where she produced films on rape, domestic violence, ageism at work, fertility and the effects of poverty. She is author of Trust me, I’m not a Politician.

The funniest author-illustrator, brother-sister duo is back to raise the roof with games, draw-alongs and silly stories. The bestselling creators of The Fart that Changed the World present their hilarious new adventure, The Day I Fell Down the Toilet. Find out what happens when timid Timothy Trench is plunged down a toilet into the land where jokes come from and is challenged to find the funniest joke in the land – or else… Laugh-alongs guaranteed!

Please bring your own sketchbook and pencils to draw along in this event.

An unmissable wild family gameshow with acclaimed French comedian Marcel Lucont, in which kids get to be pests, politicians and pétomanes (Google it) in order to be crowned the most awful child. See what happens when international insouciance meets infantile exuberance. A huge hit at Edinburgh Fringe and many other festivals, the award-winning comic channels his acerbic humour and quickfire wit into a series of tasks for the younger generation, which is every bit as entertaining for adults as it is for children. Très funny!

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. And while you wait for your pizza to cook, you can decorate your own pizza box!
Dairy-free and gluten-free options available

Academic and broadcaster Professor Alice Roberts (Channel 4’s Time Team, BBC2’s Digging for Britain) brings us face to face with individuals who lived and died between ten and five centuries ago, giving a brilliant and unexpected portrait of modern Britain. The stories she tells in Crypt are not comforting tales; there’s a focus on pathology, on disease and injury, and the experience of human suffering in the past. Most of the dead will remain anonymous but, thrillingly, she introduces an individual whose life and bones were marked by chronic debilitating disease – and whose name might just be found in history.

Delve beneath panicky headlines about China and our relationship with it in this discussion between James Curran, Kevin Rudd and Yuan Yang. The panel discusses what a future relationship between the UK, Europe and China looks like, and the best ways in which to both push back and quietly stabilise relationships with the Asian country.

James Curran is the Australian Financial Review’s International Editor and professor of modern history at Sydney University. Kevin Rudd is a former Prime Minister of Australia. Yuan Yang is deputy Beijing bureau chief at the Financial Times, and has been a reporter in China since 2016. Her first book is Private Revolutions, which explores inequality in China through the lives of five women. They speak to journalist Emma Graham-Harrison.

In a wide-ranging conversation with University of Oxford's Professor Sarah Hill, DJ Huw Stephens (BBC Radio 6, BBC Radio Wales and BBC Radio Cymru) reveals how he selected 100 Welsh records for his new book, and how these artists have influenced Wales’ culture, past and present. He analyses highlights in the careers of the most important recording artists Wales has produced, singing in English or Welsh – including Tom Jones, Shirley Bassey, Dafydd Iwan, Max Boyce, Manic Street Preachers, Super Furry Animals, Adwaith and Mace the Great.

Debut novelist Rose Wilding talks to author Jeanette Winterson about her multi-layered thriller. Seven women stand in shock in a seedy hotel room; a man’s severed head sits in the centre of the floor. Each of the women – the wife, the teenager, the ex, the journalist, the colleague, the friend, and the woman who raised him – has a very good reason to have done it, yet each swears she didn’t. In order to protect each other, they must figure out who did. Against the ticking clock of a murder investigation, each woman’s secret is brought to light as the connections between them converge to reveal a killer.

Bring your best ideas to this solutions-focused workshop session. Facilitated by sustainability entrepreneur Andy Middleton and joined by key speakers to be announced, we’ll look at the key issue of the economy, discussing the scale of the issue and a range of solutions.

Speakers include remarkable individuals leading climate and biodiversity resilience projects, igniting hope and progress in their neighbourhoods and the wider community. We want you to share your ideas and to be inspired by those making a difference. Be part of the change in this two-hour thought laboratory.

Now You’re Asking with Marian Keyes and Tara Flynn is the hit BBC Sounds and Radio 4 podcast where two Irish legends of page and screen solve the problems their listeners have emailed in. Or try to, anyway. For one day only (until they ask us again, next year) the podcast moves from Marian’s ‘good front room’ in Co Dublin and is live at Hay Festival.

From dilemmas about life, love and grief, to the perils of laundry or knowing what to say at a boring dinner, we’ll find out what Marian and Tara would recommend…which might not solve the problem exactly but will make us all feel a bit better.

Charlotte Church’s childhood and teenage years were a jumble of global superstardom, financial wealth, tabloid intrusion and the accompanying personal strain. Now, she has taken her experiences of chaos and her passion for wellbeing and is a tenacious campaigner for climate action, economic equity, integrated education and political accountability. Church talks to writer and theatre producer Mary Loudon about her campaigning and The Dreaming, her house in mid-Wales which hosts retreats to provide healing, inspire change and cry hope in a troubled world.

Surrounded by a necklace of crises from Ukraine via the Middle East to the Maghreb, Europe has been signalling that it must play a more active role on the global stage, but it has sat passively as China and the US direct the course of events. As we approach the US presidential election, does Europe have the strength, ability and will to assert itself against an unpredictable mixture of populism, war, technological advance and economic uncertainty? Misha Glenny, journalist and Rector of the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna, asks the EU’s former Vice-President, Baroness Catherine Ashton, political scientist Ivan Krastev and Rafał Trzaskowski, Polish politician and current city mayor of Warsaw, whether Europe can weather the approaching storms.

The International Booker Prize celebrates the world’s best fiction in translation. It’s awarded annually for a single book and celebrates the vital work of translators, with the £50,000 prize money divided equally between author and translator. The prize will be announced in May, and we present the winners in conversation with Booker Prize Foundation Director Gaby Wood and one of the judges, Booker Prize-shortlisted novelist Romesh Gunesekera.

Born in Belize, brought up in London’s Tottenham, singer/songwriter/composer Errollyn Wallen talks about her life and work in jazz, pop and classical music. Her book Becoming a Composer combines memoir, observations, diary entries, poems and essays, demystifying the world of composing. Her output includes more than 20 operas and numerous orchestral, chamber and vocal works. She has composed pieces for the opening ceremony of the Paralympic Games in 2012, for Queen Elizabeth II’s Golden and Diamond Jubilees and a reimagining of Parry’s Jerusalem for the Last Night of the Proms. She talks to choir director Juliet Russell.