Stormzy, Tracey Emin, Barbara Kingsolver and Richard Osman are among those appearing at this year’s Hay festival.
The full festival programme includes more than 500 in-person events taking place from 25 May to 4 June. Tickets are currently on sale to friends of Hay festival and general sale opens 17 March. The slogan for this year’s event is “11 days of different”, with Hay festival CEO Julie Finch saying it will be a space “where great minds won’t always think alike, and where imaginations are free to roam”.
Stormzy will take part in a special event celebrating five years of his publishing imprint #Merky Books. He is one of a number of musicians who are book-lovers appearing at the festival; Dua Lipa will take part in a live recording of her podcast At Your Service with Booker prize-winner Douglas Stuart, and will also talk about her love of reading with Booker Prize Foundation director Gaby Wood.
Turner prizewinner Emin will discuss her cancer diagnosis and recovery, and her creative resurgence.
Kingsolver will discuss her new novel Demon Copperhead, while Osman will be in conversation with his brother Mat Osman, author of The Ghost Theatre and bassist in the rock band Suede, about turning their hands to writing fiction.
Margaret Atwood, Elif Shafak and Douglas Stuart will take part in a special event focused on Salman Rushdie’s new novel Victory City. Rushdie is not promoting the novel in person as he is still recovering from an attack last year which left him with the loss of sight in one eye and without the use of one hand.
The festival features music performances from the Proclaimers and others, as well as comedy nights, film screenings and debates.
“Writing goes across everything we do,” says Finch. “Because we are a festival of ideas and arts and literature, we have a sense of endless possibilities. The way in which we are bringing together different art forms is through the idea of writing and words in its broadest sense.”
Hay is continuing its partnership with Ukraine’s biggest book festival, Lviv Book Forum, with a series of co-curated events spotlighting Ukrainian storytelling and the state of Ukraine today. These include doctors Henry Marsh and Rachel Clarke joining historian Olesya Khromeychuk to talk about life and death in Ukraine with the Guardian’s Emma Graham-Harrison, and poets and writers Halyna Kruk and Serhiy Zhadan, who are experiencing the war in Ukraine first-hand and grappling with its impact, discussing how you begin to process and write about the devastation conflict brings.
First-time fiction authors including Liv Little, Alice Winn and Santanu Bhattacharya will be showcased in the Debut Discoveries series.
Planet Assembly, a new series for Hay in 2023, explores solutions to help regenerate the planet, while this year’s Hay on Earth Forum explores food production and climate change, including a range of activities aimed at tackling the festival’s own negative environmental impacts.
The festival has already announced the Eurovision book contest, with people being asked to send in their suggestions for the best books from countries that compete in the Eurovision song contest.
This is the first main Hay festival fully overseen by Finch, who was appointed after co-founder and director Peter Florence resigned, following an independent investigation that upheld an internal complaint of bullying against him.
