Join host Natalie Haynes for a special gala event to celebrate the 35th anniversary year of Hay Festival. Writers and performers will share the literary works that have most inspired them over the years along with anecdotes from their favourite Festival moments. Speakers include Onjali Q. Raúf, Laura Bates, Marcus du Sautoy, Oliver Bullough, Adam Rutherford, Caryl Lewis, Ayanna Lloyd Banwo, Zelda Perkins, Chris Power and Raven Smith.
Adam Rutherford is a scientist, writer and broadcaster. He has written and presented award-winning series and programmes for the BBC, including Radio 4’s Inside Science and The Curious Cases of Rutherford & Fry with Dr Hannah Fry. His next book is Control: The Dark History and Troubling Present of Eugenics.
Ayanna Lloyd Banwo has been published in Moko Magazine, Small Axe, PREE, Callaloo and Anomaly among others, and shortlisted for Small Axe Literary Competition and the Wasafiri New Writing Prize. When We Were Birds is her first novel.
Caryl Lewis is a multi-award-winning Welsh novelist, children's writer, playwright and screenwriter. Her breakthrough novel Martha, Jac a Sianco (2004) is widely regarded as a modern classic of Welsh literature, and sits on the Welsh curriculum. Drift is her debut novel in the English language.
Chris Power is the author of A Lonely Man and Mothers, which was long listed for the Rathbones Folio Prize and shortlisted for the Edge Hill Short Story Prize.
Laura Bates is the founder of the Everyday Sexism Project and writes regularly for the New York Times, Guardian, Telegraph and many others. Her books include Men Who Hate Women, her novels The Burning and The Trial, and the upcoming Fix the System, Not the Women.
Marcus du Sautoy holds Oxford University's prestigious Simonyi Chair for the Public Understanding of Science, a post previously held by Richard Dawkins, and is also a professor of Mathematics. His latest book is Thinking Better: The Art of the Shortcut.
Natalie Haynes is a broadcaster and author of six books, most recently Pandora’s Jar: Women and the Greek Myths (2020) and A Thousand Ships, which was longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2020.
Oliver Bullough is the author of the financial exposé Moneyland, a Sunday Times bestseller, and two celebrated books about the former Soviet Union: The Last Man in Russia and Let Our Fame Be Great. His next book, Butler to the World: How Britain became the servant of tycoons, tax dodgers, kleptocrats and criminals is out in May.
Onjali Q. Raúf is a bestselling children’s author and the founder and CEO of two NGO’s: Making Herstory and O’s Refugee Aid Team. She is the author of The Boy at the Back of the Class, The Star Outside My Window, The Day We Met The Queen, The Night Bus Hero, The Great (Food) Bank Heist, and The Lion Above the Door.
Zelda Perkins has been campaigning since 2017 when she was the first woman to break an NDA, signed decades earlier, with Harvey Weinstein. She is the co-founder of Can't Buy My Silence, bringing the systematic abuse of NDAs to the attention of the British Government and international press and pushing the England and Wales Solicitors Regulatory Authority to take disciplinary action against the lawyer who created her NDA for Weinstein. She was named a Person of the Year by Time magazine in 2017 and by the Guardian in 2020.
Raven Smith is a columnist at Vogue, one of the funniest people on Instagram, and author of RAVEN SMITH’S TRIVIAL PURSUITS and the upcoming RAVEN SMITH'S MEN.
