THE HAY FESTIVAL

The Hay Festival is eleven days of talks at the end of May in Hay-on-Wye, a market town on the Welsh side of the border with England. Some six hundred events are held in a village of tents in the fields outside the town: novelists, historians, scientists and politicians, each given an hour and an audience that has done the reading.

It began at a kitchen table. In 2001 Bill Clinton called it the Woodstock of the mind.

The Kingdom of Books

Hay was a town of books before it had a festival.

In 1962 Richard Booth opened a second-hand bookshop in the old fire station. He opened more, and by the 1970s Hay was being called the first book town in the world. It still has more than twenty bookshops.

On 1 April 1977 Booth declared Hay an independent kingdom, crowned himself King Richard Coeur de Livre, and made his horse prime minister. He died in 2019, at eighty.

The Kitchen Table

The festival was dreamt up in 1987 around a kitchen table by Peter Florence and his parents, Norman and Rhoda, and the story goes that the first one was paid for with a hundred pounds won at poker. It was held in 1988, and some two thousand people came.

The next year Arthur Miller took the stage and asked whether Hay-on-Wye was some kind of sandwich.

It has long outgrown the town. The tents now stand at Dairy Meadows, inside the Bannau Brycheiniog National Park, and the festival has since been held in some thirty places on five continents.

What to Know

It runs from a Thursday to the Sunday of the following week, across the late May bank holiday.

Each event is ticketed on its own. The festival’s own members book first, in the winter, and the full programme is published in the spring.

Country attire, and something for rain. The site is a field, and it is Wales in May.

Rooms in the town are few and go early. The farmhouses and inns of the Wye valley take the rest.

The bookshops are the other half of the visit, and the time between events is for them.

The mistake is to book only the famous names. The biggest tents hold the stars; the small ones hold the arguments.

The Court

The Hay Festival is not the Court’s own. Tickets for the events a member chooses, and a room in a town that has few, are sought on a member’s behalf, and the Court arranges the whole of it: getting there, where to stay in the border country, and the table afterward.

How one becomes a member is set out under Admission.