Hay Festival

Before acclaimed writers, musicians, scientists, and philosophers travelled to celebrate with audiences in Chile, Lebanon, India, Mexico, USA, Croatia, and beyond, the origin story of Hay Festival begins seated around a family’s kitchen table in Hay-on-Wye, Wales, in 1987. Its publicity director, Christopher, speaks to us below about the Festival’s rural roots, 30-year evolution, and ongoing resilience — including a commendably swift shift to all-access, digital events earlier this year. As longer nights arrive to the Welsh valley and a turbulent 2020 draws to a close, Hay Festival is settling back in and turning another page.

Interview with Christopher Bone, Publicity Director.

Hay Festival Wales, Hay-on-Wye. Photo: Sam Hardwick

“Ali Smith once noted, ‘The place where the natural world meets the arts is a fruitful, fertile place for both.’”

Fields in Fields: Nearly half a million people tuned in to the Hay Festival Digital in May this year. It is warming and astounding that technology has allowed for this kind of global connectivity. Perhaps we can talk about this first. What was the process to get something like this off the ground in time for its scheduled May 2020 events? What surprised you about producing a collaboration of this scale?

Christopher Bone: The cancellation of Hay Festival Wales 2020 hit us at our very moment of maximum financial exposure and placed us in immediate peril. Our resilience has always been predicated on our audience, with 70 percent of our income coming from ticket and book sales. But that very audience came to our aid in our hour of need, raising thousands of pounds in a few days and giving us a future. Many of our wonderful partners, like Baillie Gifford and Visit Wales, offered to carry over their support for a digital event too. And so, with our short-term future secure, we set about translating our planned physical programme of some 500+ events into a digital edition that sought to inspire and entertain the festival-goers who came to our aid. Our team in Hay-on-Wye worked day and night to make the dream of our Festival a reality and the experience was collaborative; the eagerness with which writers, thinkers, and performers leapt to get involved, injecting our programme with boundless creativity and imagination — they turned it into something very special.

Hay Festival Wales. Photo: Adam Tatton Reid

Our mission has always been to bring writers and readers together to reimagine the world, often in live Festival events, but also online, in print, and in our schools tours. We already had experience of programming and broadcasting digitally — our Hay Player offers thousands of hours of audio and video from our archive for Festival subscribers; we had streamed Festival sessions to media partners, on our social feeds, and via the British Libraries Living Knowledge Network; our podcast and Book of the Month campaign were already a regular part of our annual calendar — as we sought to enhance the Festival’s accessibility with our live sites at capacity. All of this work made our transition to a fully digital Festival smoother than it might have been. But what we have seen during the pandemic is a turbocharging of these areas, and writers themselves have paved the way in many regards, from digital book clubs and read-alongs, to online Festivals and workshops. The internet has been awash with incredible opportunities for readers to connect with literature as never before. Nobody needed convincing that a digital Festival was a good idea.

More than anything, it was our audience that showed the most passion for placing Hay Festival in a digital space. They embraced the idea with an enthusiasm that continues to inspire us all (see here).

How might this newfound mode of broadcasting influence the way you produce events in the future?

There have been many lessons captured from the experience. The idea that “digital” automatically means “accessible to all” feels to be the most important. We worked hard to find ways to help support our audience in accessing content, just as we do with our physical editions, but it remains a fact of great concern for us that digital-only models exclude swathes of our festival community.

With our digital audience now bigger than it has ever been, we hope to carry this forwards into all of our future projects. But this past year has also underscored what makes a physical Festival so important: the place, the chance encounters, the ability to discover new passions. If we ever needed a reminder of the value in what we do, then this has given it.

The crowd at Hay Festival Wales. Photo courtesy of Hay Festival.

Stepping back in time, Hay-on-Wye became affectionately known as “The Town of Books” during the 1970s, and in 1988, “The Hay Festival of Literature and Arts” was founded by the Florence family. Can you tell us about the Festival’s evolution?

For decades the town of books, Hay-on-Wye, has drawn creatives to its inspiring location at the foot of the Black Mountains. From this community of book lovers, the Festival was founded around a kitchen table in 1987 and has grown enormously since, with editions in Colombia, Peru, Mexico, and Spain. A journalist covering our Festival in Cartagena, Colombia, once said to me: “You know, this is so big now that they even have one in Wales!” That communities of book lovers all over the world have taken up the idea of Hay Festival with such passion and pride is a wonderful thing.

“Ours is an increasingly divided world … Publishing has a duty to meet this moment with the widest possible pool of creativity.”

Nowhere throws a party quite like Hay-on-Wye. Anybody you ask in the town will have their own favourites, from Ted Hughes reading against a storm in a tent that almost left the ground, to Maya Angelou summoning a rainbow over the Wye through sheer force of poetry. For me, Margaret Atwood leading a row of her handmaids through the site to her event in 2018 stands out. The image of the bonneted red women walking over our green fields, through the town and then down the festival walkways sent a shiver down my spine. I expect that 2020, the year our audience had to stay at home but gather from afar to celebrate writers and share ideas, will be one that lasts in our memories forever.

When we were facing closure in 2001 as Foot-and-Mouth seemed to threaten everything about the rural way of life, and herds had to be destroyed up and down the country, the Festival learned a lot about resilience. With the option of cancellation on the table, the local farmers became some of the festival’s strongest advocates in recognition for its economic contribution to the area, working with us to ensure the festival could go ahead with the relevant safety precautions in place. In 2018, the Festival generated more than £25.8m for the local economy so, beyond its cultural significance, this makes it an important economic part of local life.

Arundhati Roy at Hay Festival Wales. Photo: Morgan Williams

Orhan Pamuk at Hay Festival Arequipa. Photo courtesy of Hay Festival.

Michael Ondaatje at Hay Festival Querétaro. Photo courtesy of Hay Festival.

Margaret Atwood at Hay Festival Cartagena. Photo courtesy of Hay Festival.

Considering the vital role of literature — its historical and political significance, literacy as a human right, printed literature’s intersection with technology, to name a few — what are your thoughts on literary communities and publishing industries today and in the near future?

Ours is an increasingly divided world and digital connection alone cannot solve our deeper need for networks of empathy. Writers are uniquely placed to cross borders and boundaries with their storytelling; opening access to their books on- and off-line can only be a good thing and is something we should all strive towards.

Publishing has a duty to meet this moment with the widest possible pool of creativity; more representation is essential and society as a whole needs to protect the freedoms of its writers and the sharing of their work. The state of library funding in the UK, for example, is regressive and short sighted.

Do rural settings provide distinct opportunities or challenges for cultural and creative endeavours like the Festival?

Putting on a globally recognised Festival in a location as remote as Hay-on-Wye brings enormous challenges, not least with the environmental impact of bringing so many visitors from all over the world to the town, which we work hard to mitigate against. However, the gains to doing so are many. It is the location and community of book lovers here that give the Festival its star quality. People come for the writers, of course, but they also come for the town’s second-hand bookshops, the sheep’s milk ice cream at Shepherds, the walk down the Wye, and a paddle in the Warren, and the stunning views from atop Hay Bluff. Our connection to the natural world around us is what makes our Green Hay initiatives so important to our global work.

Places often play integral roles in stories and the arts. A place can hold symbols, emotions, characters, and can also be a character in its own right in a story for instance. Are there compelling or timely narratives of “the rural” today that you wish to share?

As Ali Smith once noted, “The place where the natural world meets the arts is a fruitful, fertile place for both.” Landscape, narrative, history, and ethics are deeply intertwined. In Britain today we are living through a golden age of literature that reflects on our changing relationship to the natural world around us, from James Rebanks’s The Shepherd’s Life or Jini Reddy’s Wanderland, to Benjamin Myers’s The Offing or Jackie Morris and Robert Macfarlane’s The Lost Words.

The future is hybrid events.

Best invention? The book.

Our recommended 2020 reads: Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet; Susie Dent’s Word Perfect (already a runaway success for our Winter event); our Book of the Month for November, Caleb Femi’s Poor; Carys Bray’s fresh take on the climate crisis, When the Lights Go Out; Rebecca Watson’s upcoming debut, little scratch; and Nigella Lawson’s Cook, Eat, Repeat, one I’ve been savouring page by page during this latest lockdown.

The Hay Festival’s upcoming Digital Winter Weekend will take place 26–29 November 2020. All events are free to access, its programme includes conversations with: Pen Vogler and Dan Saladino on the changing fortunes of food; Jonathan Freedland, David Olusoga, and Katya Adler on COVID-19, Black Lives Matter, Brexit, climate breakdown, and the US elections; a celebration for the winner of the 2020 Booker Prize for Fiction (announced on 19th November 2020); an introduction to Black British history for readers aged 12+ by historian and broadcaster David Olusoga; as well as Elton John, Dawn French, Robert Macfarlane, Jackie Morris, Arsène Wenger, Benjamin Zephaniah, Lee Child, John Banville, and more.

Hay Festival Foundation is a registered charity and continues its commitment to access and inclusion and to the pursuit of excellence and happiness. In addition to the Festivals, the Foundation’s past and ongoing projects include: schools programmes, for which they brought renowned authors directly to students learning at home this year; library events and development projects in partnership with Plan International and The British Library; internships and work opportunities for young people ages 18–25 across the UK with Hay Academy; and Hay in the Parc, a nine-year literacy partnership with HMYOI Bridgend's Parc Prison.

To learn more about how you can support Hay Festival, visit Support Us. #HayMakers

Published on 17 November 2020. Edited by Fields in Fields. Cover photograph by Adam Tatton Reid; all images courtesy of Hay Festival. ■ Hay Festival, Dairy Meadows, Brecon Road, Hay-on-Wye HR3 5PJ. Visit: hayfestival.com

Culture, CharityBeverlyNovember 17, 2020PowysComment