Category Archives: Hay festival

Toby Jones praises ‘extraordinary dignity’ of Post Office accused

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Actor, who played campaigner Alan Bates in TV drama, calls Horizon scandal a ‘Hitchcockian nightmare’ at Hay festival

The post office operators prosecuted in the Post Office Horizon scandal have “extraordinary dignity” after living 20 years in a “Hitchcockian nightmare”, according to actor Toby Jones.

Jones played Alan Bates, a former post office operator and leading campaigner for justice for staff wrongly blamed for accounting shortfalls caused by faulty software, in the ITV drama that put the scandal back in the spotlight.

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Julia Gillard says progress on gender equality is ‘really glacial’

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Former Australian prime minister issues warning that young men’s thinking on the issue is going backward

Former Australian prime minister Julia Gillard has said global progress on gender equality is “really glacial and slow” as she warned that it is going backwards among young people.

Gillard cited recent polling by King’s College London’s Global Institute for Women’s Leadership, which showed that 51% of respondents believe that men are doing too much to support gender equality, while 46% think that men are now discriminated against.

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Being a politician was ‘very yucky’, ex-MP Rory Stewart tells Hay audience

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Former Tory minister admits at festival that he felt a fraud due to need to give the impression he was in three places at once

Former Conservative MP Rory Stewart found being a politician “very yucky” and felt like a fraud, he told an audience at Hay festival on Saturday.

Asked whether he would consider going back into politics, he said that he found being a politician “personally very, very unpleasant” and “didn’t like it”, adding: “I feel like a fraud all the time, in a whole series of ways.”

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‘I miss my solitude’: Booker winner Paul Lynch says he is a ‘social introvert’

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Author of novel Prophet Song about an imagined fascist Ireland tells Hay audience he is not a political writer

“I miss my solitude,” last year’s Booker prize winner Paul Lynch told an audience at Hay festival on Saturday.

“In many ways I didn’t sign up for this. I’m an introvert who’s learned how to be social, a social introvert,” he said. “I signed up to sit in a room on my own for three or four years and write a book,” he said.

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David Nicholls warns readers against trying to visit novel’s locations

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Bestselling writer says Lake District sites in new book You Are Here are ‘genuinely all made up’

David Nicholls has warned his fans not to attempt to visit the locations in his new novel. While those who loved the hit Netflix adaptation of Nicholls’ novel One Day have been able to visit locations from the series, such as the Lewisham pizza joint Bella Roma or Charlton Lido, the locations in You Are Here “are genuinely all made up”, the author said.

The novel, which was published last month and follows a midlife couple as they hike through the Lake District, contain a disclaimer from the author explaining that while he has “tried to describe the landscape as accurately as possible, the pubs, hotels and restaurants along the way are all entirely fictional”, and he has also “taken a few small liberties with the route”.

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Nick Cave speaks out against boycotting songs because of creators’ actions

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Australian musician told Hay festival we should not ‘eradicate the best of these people in order to punish the worst of them’

Nick Cave has said that boycotting songs because of the actions of the artist “is not a very good way to go about things”.

The Australian singer-songwriter told the Hay festival: “Making art – especially making music – it prevents you from becoming the worst aspects of your character, and that’s why I very much think we need to be very, very careful about the music we don’t think people should listen to any more because of what the artist who has made that music may have been like,” the Australian singer-songwriter said.

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Bernardine Evaristo fears publishers may lose interest in black authors

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Diversity in book industry must be sustained, and start at the top, Booker prize-winning author tells Hay festival

The Booker prize-winning author Bernardine Evaristo says she fears that publishers’ interest in black authors may be only a “trend or fashion” that could wane unless the business becomes more diverse.

Evaristo, who was the first black woman to win the literary prize for her novel Girl, Woman, Other in 2019, said that the Black Lives Matter movement and the murder of George Floyd in 2020 “really did shake the industry to the core” and had marked a turning point in previously “excluded” authors getting book deals.

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Blair and former PMs should not act as political ‘figureheads’, says Ed Balls

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Ex-Labour minister tells Hay festival that the involvement of former leaders in the ‘next phase of politics’ may not be sensible

Ed Balls has said former prime ministers such as Tony Blair and David Cameron should not attempt to return as “figureheads for the next phase of politics”.

The former cabinet minister’s comments addressed Blair’s upcoming Future of Britain conference, which is seen as an attempt to reinvigorate centrist politics in the UK by taking inspiration from the success of La République En Marche, the recently created centre-left party that brought Emmanuel Macron to power in France.

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Jacqueline Wilson: my mother slept with a gun under her pillow

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Children’s author says she told her elderly mother to get rid of it as she was terrified of being mistakenly shot

The children’s author Dame Jacqueline Wilson has said her elderly mother slept with a gun beneath her pillow.

Wilson, creator of the Tracy Beaker series, told an audience at the Hay festival in Wales that she was daughter of a character more colourful than any she had written – and that she was terrified her mother might shoot her by accident, and persuaded her to get rid of it.

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Monica Ali ‘terrified’ of writing sex scenes in new novel

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Brick Lane author says fear of winning Bad Sex award loomed over writing of latest book, Love Marriage

The Brick Lane author Monica Ali has said she was “terrified” to write the sex scenes in her most recent novel, Love Marriage, with the fear of being nominated for the Bad Sex awards looming over her as she wrote.

In an event at the Hay festival in Wales, the 54-year-old writer told the audience: “There’s all sorts of pitfalls to writing sex scenes – you might end up using words like ‘throbbing’, ‘thrusting’, ‘member’”.

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‘Gross incompetence at highest levels’: ex-Obama adviser blasts Trump’s Covid response

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Samantha Power also tells online Hay festival that former US administration underestimated how ‘ripped off’ Americans felt, and discounts possibility of Michelle Obama as vice-president

The US has shown “gross incompetence … at the highest levels” in dealing with the Covid-19 pandemic, according to Samantha Power, who served as US ambassador to the United Nations under Barack Obama.

Speaking to Philippe Sands for the online version of the Hay festival, Power said that Donald Trump’s administration had failed to learn from the countries hit by the coronavirus before the US.

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Gloria Steinem says TV drama of 1970s feminist history ‘ridiculous’

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In interview for Hay festival feminist writer says Mrs America misrepresents equal rights movement

It stars Cate Blanchett and Rose Byrne in a glossy, big-budget TV account of 1970s feminist history but one key player who was there, Gloria Steinem, is withering: it is ridiculous, undermining and just not very good, she said on Friday.

Steinem, arguably the world’s most famous feminist, has revealed she is not a fan of the new Hulu TV show Mrs America, which premiered in the US last month and is coming to BBC2 in the UK later in the year.

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As Hay festival opens in the UAE, authors condemn free speech abuses

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Stephen Fry, Noam Chomsky and more than 40 NGOs say the country’s support for the event is at odds with its record on human rights

As bestselling authors from Jung Chang to Bernardine Evaristo prepare to gather in Abu Dhabi for the first Hay festival in the United Arab Emirates, leading figures have spoken out against the country’s compromised free speech. Stephen Fry - the festival’s president – has joined more than 40 public figures and organisations castigating its government for “promoting a platform for freedom of expression, while keeping behind bars Emirati citizens and residents who shared their own views and opinions”.

An open letter signed by Fry, Noam Chomsky, and a coalition of more than 40 NGOs including Amnesty and PEN International, is calling on the UAE to use the launch of the festival’s Abu Dhabi branch – which opens on Tuesday – to “demonstrate their respect for the right to freedom of expression by freeing all human rights defenders imprisoned for expressing themselves peacefully online”.

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Novelist Pat Barker hits out at ‘fashionable’ diversity schemes

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Prize-winning author says she distrusts post-Brexit interest in regional and working-class voices

The Man Booker prize-winning author Pat Barker says she “distrusts” London publishing’s recent burst in diversity initiatives, calling the rise in interest in regional and working-class voices a “fashionable” move motivated by fear after the Brexit referendum.

Speaking at the Hay festival on Sunday, the Durham author said she had observed an increased appetite for authors based outside London, or from working-class and minority ethnic backgrounds, over the last three years.

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Top UK scientist urges people to take vitamin D supplements

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Geneticist Steve Jones, formerly a sceptic, says case for doing so is overwhelming

One of Britain’s leading scientists has urged people to take vitamin D supplements, particularly children, who spend an hour less outside than they did 10 years ago.

The geneticist Steve Jones told the Hay literary festival in Wales the health case for taking them was now overwhelming. “I never thought I would be a person who would take vitamin supplements, I always thought it was absolute nonsense, it’s homeopathy. I now take vitamin D every day,” he said.

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Women are happier without children or a spouse, says happiness expert

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Behavioural scientist Paul Dolan says traditional markers of success no longer apply

We may have suspected it already, but now the science backs it up: unmarried and childless women are the happiest sub-group in the population. And they are more likely to live longer than their married and child-rearing peers, according to a leading expert in happiness.

Speaking at the Hay festival on Saturday, Paul Dolan, a professor of behavioural science at the London School of Economics, said the latest evidence showed that the traditional markers used to measure success did not correlate with happiness – particularly marriage and raising children.

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UK’s first black police chief asks why there have been no others

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Michael Fuller, who led Kent force, says women have hit top ranks but not black officers

Britain’s first black chief constable has questioned why no one has been given the opportunity to follow his path, despite the talent available.

Michael Fuller was expressing his concerns to an audience at Hay festival, where he also asked why the Football Association had not done more to combat racism against players, and revealed he was approached to join the Masons.

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‘Identity is a pain in the arse’: Zadie Smith on political correctness

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At Hay Cartagena festival author questions role of social media in policing personal development

The writer Zadie Smith laid into identity politics in a headline session at the 14th Hay Cartagena festival, insisting that novelists had not only a right, but a duty to be free.

Asked how she felt about cultural appropriation, she told an audience of nearly 2,000 at the festival in Colombia on Friday: “If someone says to me: ‘A black girl would never say that,’ I’m saying: ‘How can you possibly know?’ The problem with that argument is it assumes the possibility of total knowledge of humans. The only thing that identifies people in their entirety is their name: I’m a Zadie.”

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