In today's programme, Claire Armitstead talks to the poet Owen Sheers, singer/songwriter Fflur Dafydd and leading Welsh cultural historian Dai Smith.
Sheers has been coming to Hay since he was 15 and is a festival stalwart. He published his first novel last year: Resistance, set in a Wales occupied by the Nazis.
He writes in English, but thinks "Welsh is a language that fits in the mouth so well and has an incredible rhythm." Dafydd has been translating Sheer's work into Welsh - and setting some of it to music. You can hear the poem Rehearsal recast as "Reciting Broken Beckett" at the end of the programme.
Smith has just published a biography of the cultural critic and novelist Raymond Williams, called A Warrior's Tale. "Many think that Raymond became Welsh late in life," says Smith, "but his papers show he's extraordinarily conscious of being Welsh back in the 1940s."
The panel also talk about the traditional Welsh dish laverbread - "I think I stepped in it once," says Dai Smith - while the River Cafe's Rose Gray samples contemporary Welsh cooking at the Hay festival site.
Plus: Hanif Kureishi compares creative writing courses to mental hospitals, and Jimmy Carter on how to be a good president.
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