Hay Festival gathers people together to think about the world as it is and to imagine how it might be. It’s a big conversation about discovery and intellectual adventure. We share stories and ideas with great international writers and thinkers, film-makers, historians and novelists, philosophers, environmentalists, poets and scientists. And at night we like to party with the greatest comedians and musicians. It’s a bunch of mates hanging out in a field with time to think, finding the inspiration to re-imagine the world. Hay is, in Bill Clinton’s phrase, ‘the Woodstock of the mind’.
Hay Festival is set in a magical book town, Hay-on-Wye, in the Black Mountains of the Brecon Beacons National Park. We also create festivals all around the world every year from Columbia to Spain, and from Mexico to Denmark.