Hay Festival News Articles

‘It’s so exciting that literature, Kells, the Irish and Hay are all coming together,’ said actress Sinead Cusack at the launch of Hay Festival Kells.

The first Hay Festival Kells and the first in the Republic of Ireland will take place on 28, 29 30 June and joins the extended family of Hay Festivals in 12 locations worldwide.

‘The Hay Festival celebrates literature and I’m an addict,’ said Cusack. ‘I have to have six books on the go at the same time.’

This was her first visit to Hay and she enthused about the fantastic atmosphere at the festival site and in the town.

At the launch were the Hay Festival Kells team, celebrating the culmination of two years of discussions that had led to the delivery of 50 events encompassing Irish and international authors, musicians and comedians.

Their aim is to ensure the town of Kells, 40 miles from Dublin, becomes a cultural destination. ‘The town is already gearing up for the Festival,’ said Geraldine Gaughran of the Kells delegation. A team of Local Heroes is painting the town and generally smartening it up, empty shops are turning into pop-ups, there will be walking tours, exhibitions and plenty of craic in addition toliterary lectures and discussions.

Actress Lisa Dwan, who will perform her acclaimed Not I Beckett play at Kells, emphasized what a great fit Hay and Kells were, and said, ‘I can’t wait to see the impact on the town of Kells’. Having worked with the Hay Festival in Wales for more than 10 years, she was certain the new venture would be a success. ‘After all,’ she said, ‘They say the Welsh are the Irish who couldn’t swim.’

For more information visit www.hayfestival.org/kells where tickets can be bought in advance. Alternatively, phone the Hay Festival Box Office on +44 (0) 1497 822 629.

Tony Juniper, dubbed ‘the most effective of Britain’s eco-warriors’ discussed ‘the economy of ecology’ and why it makes economic sense to look after the environment, the subject of his book What has Nature Ever Done for Us? 

Juniper described ‘Michael Gove’s attempt to downgrade the environment in our National Curriculum’ as ‘terrifying’. He attributes it to the current prevalence of an ‘anti-nature narrative in politics’ heightened by the economic crisis. His book, he said, is ‘an attempt to flip that argument and show that nature is fundamental to economic growth’.

Juniper made a plea ‘to switch our mind sets and look differently at where the real economic value lies’.

The British government has estimated that a 50 per cent reduction in rainforest destruction, for example, would produce 3.7 trillion dollars in terms of carbon capture.’

Jim Robbins, a Montana journalist, was drawn into the climate change debate by an intriguing news story, which inspired his book The Man who Plants Trees. Robbins discovered ‘one man cloning every largest tree of every species’ in an attempt ‘to preserve the genetics of the proven survivors against climate change and for future study’.

He said, ‘When the oldest trees in the world start dying and when the scientists say the last 50 years has been the hottest on record, it’s time to start paying attention.’ 

Top quotes:

Tony Juniper: ‘We need to make an historic shift as a global community to stop seeing nature as an impediment to economic development and start seeing it as our greatest asset.’

Jim Robbins: ‘You can burn all the furniture in your home and stay warm, but what are you going to have left?’

This afternoon the work of Bangor-born Brenda Chamberlain was rediscovered and celebrated by a panel chaired by Richard Davies, a director at Parthian publishers and the Library of Wales series, which includes Chamberlain’s The Water Castle.

The artist, writer and poet is being brought back into the spotlight via a biography, restoration of her murals and production of her play.

Jill Piercy spent at least 20 years researching Chamberlain’s biography. She described her as ‘incredibly elusive’, saying she wrote when she was sad and painted when she was happy.

Art historian Peter Lord suggested that Tide-Race, Chamberlain’s novel based on her time on Bardsey Island,was a ‘fabled autobiography’ under the guise of fiction. Chamberlain was asked to leave Bardsey as a result of the book from which neighbours recognised themselves.

Chamberlain also wrote The Protagonist, a play set on the Greek island of Hydra during the time of the colonels. Damian Davies, head of English at University of Aberystwyth, said: ‘I think she was the greatest writer of islands’.

Davies described Chamberlain as one of the most international voices of the time and said, ‘During the ’40s she was sowing her poetry around the world.’

Lord said: ‘Brenda was the first woman to make a significant impact on the Welsh art world.’

Piercy concluded, ‘I think if Brenda were alive now, she’d be in her element with the internet and multi-media platforms.’

Top quote:

Damian Davies: ‘She was a pioneer in talking about the relationship between the visual and the textual.’

Winston Churchill told his troops to defend El Alamein, the Egyptian town where German General Erwin Rommel’s Afrika Korps was finally stopped in World War Two, as if it were English soil, said Jonathan Dimbleby in an impassioned and animated talk at the Hay Festival.

In his new book, Destiny in the Desert: The road to El Alamein, The Battle That Turned The Tide Dimbleby argues that this north African desert battle had huge significance.

‘North Africa was the true second front,’ he said.

Dimbleby paid homage to the hundreds of soldiers who perished ‘for a cause that many of them found difficult, if not impossible to appreciate’.

Researched through private letters, memoirs and diaries of first hand testimonies, the book has a large cast of characters. He also discussed the work of his father, Richard Dimbleby, a BBC correspondent at the time.

‘The book takes the form of a soap opera,’ he said.

He discussed the volatile arguments that raged between Churchill and his most high profile general, Bernard Montgomery.

Whilst admitting that General Rommel was a remarkable commander, Dimbleby said: ‘if I had to choose who to serve under, I would choose Monty as I think my chances would be better’.

It so happened that one of General Montgomery’s personal secretaries was in the audience at Hay this morning.

Top Quotes:

“I think there is far too much of an obsession in history on sexuality. As it were, bugger the sex”.

“Nazism was fought on the soils of Africa.”

‘Britain has neglected its woods to such an extent that more than a million acres are neglected and derelict, yet it imports seedlings, timber and charcoal,’ said Rob Penn, woodsman, author and broadcaster.

He said that until 50 years ago, ash products had been in every home, but now wood owners mainly sold ash wood for burning, and Ash Dieback, a disease imported from Europe, threatened to wipe them out.

‘If you consider Ash Dieback and other diseases, and you consider climate change, it would be easy to conclude that our woodlands are under greater threat than at any time since the pioneer species arrived 10,000 years ago,’ he said.

‘The one bit of hope about ash in Britain is that our ash has greater genetic diversity and may not be as devastated as in Northern Europe.’

Penn made a television show called Tales from the Wild Wood about his bid to bring a derelict patch of woodland back into the kind of production that was traditional for centuries and argued that the country should do far more to encourage such ventures.

‘A tree wants to be cut down to the ground to let it grow again. That prolongs its life. It’s as simple as that.’

Top quotes:

‘If you take care of a wood, someone may walk in the wood in a hundred years and think well of you even though they don’t know your name.’

‘We import 95 percent of our charcoal, and much of it is from unsustainable sources. If you take an interest in British woodland, then you should use British charcoal.’

On squirrels: ‘They are vermin and they kill thousands of trees. It is a big problem. The pine marten is welcome in my woods any time.’

Physicist Rolf Heuer from CERN discussed the latest research on the universe and the 95 per cent of dark matter of which we have no understanding.

He said that the discovery of the Higgs Boson particle on 4 July last year was hugely important in terms of exploring and explaining unanswered questions. ‘There is a Higgs particle and then there is the Higgs particle. Finding it is like finding a small snowflake in a snow storm. However, the discovery was easy, now the real work starts.’

At CERN in Geneva there are more than 3,000 professors who work together on projects to try and answer great scientific questions. Already great progress has been made but Heuer said, ‘Our understanding of the universe in the next few years is about to change.’

Tara Shears, particle physicist, spoke about the under-representation of women in physics and her hope that the numbers will start to even out soon. Currently only a quarter of staff at CERN are female.

Talking about plans for the future, Heuer made a plea for more political support for science. ‘Politicians will not come to science, we need to go to them and say maybe you can learn something.’

Top quotes:

Rolf Heuer: ‘I think it is very important to foster the relationship between philosophy and physics.’

Tara Shears: ‘We are on a great quest to find out more about the universe.’

‘We use super microscopes looking into the small scale. No one else gets closer than that.’

Best-selling author and historian William Dalrymple drew fascinating parallels between the failed British invasion of Afghanistan in the 1830s and ’40s and the conflict raging in the country today. Reading from his new book The Return of a King, Dalrymple summarised the origins, events and after-effects of one of Britain’s greatest military defeats, the retreat from Kabul in 1842.

 In a bravura performance, Dalrymple explained how the East India Company’s exploit to unseat the country’s then ruler Dost Mohammad Khan in favour of a British puppet ruler Shah Shuja foreshadowed the ill-fated incursion into the country after 9/11 by the ‘Coalition of the Willing’. On both occasions, he said, Western forces had won an apparently easy victory, ultimately to be defeated by a combination of complacency, bad military planning and a failure to engage with local people.

 The parallels between the two periods even stretch to their choice of pro-Western ruler, Dalrymple added, as Shah Shuja’s direct tribal descendant is none other than Afghanistan’s embattled President Hamid Karzai.

 The victory over the British in 1842 has, said Dalrymple, become the defining national victory of Afghanistan, the country’s Waterloo. Indeed in the years following Dost Mohammed Khan’s return to the throne, he defined the country’s present borders, re-taking territories such as Mazari Sharif, Konduz, Badakhshan and Kandahar.

 Dalrymple said his conversations with Afghans while researching his book highlighted how their country had been successively buffeted by imperial ambitions. He said, ‘Afghanistan is not unconquerable – everyone’s done it – but what’s difficult is to keep hold of it.’ He suggested that the country’s strategic location at the crossroads of Asia meant it could be a target for many years to come.

 Top quote:

[from his book]

‘Last month,’ said one [a tribal elder], ‘some American officers called us to a hotel in Jalalabad for a meeting. One of them asked me, “Why do you hate us?” I replied, “Because you blow down our doors, enter our houses, pull our women by the hair and kick our children. We cannot accept this. We will fight back, and we will break your teeth, and when your teeth are broken you will leave, just as the British left before you. It is just a matter of time”.’

Malorie Blackman, the multiple award-winning children’s author, yesterday described how her own experiences of racism had inspired her work. Using writing as ‘a kind of therapy’, Blackman revealed how the best-selling Noughts and Crosses was inspired, in part, by the devastating murder of black teenager Stephen Lawrence in 1993. Blackman also acknowledged that the series had provided a useful outlet for confronting personal experiences of racism and hatred.

As a child, Blackman found that black children were noticeably absent from the books she read and described how she had been discouraged from pursuing her preferred career because ‘black people just don’t become teachers’. However, until the publication of Noughts and Crosses in 2001, she deliberately avoided writing books that overtly tackled race issues as she felt that, as a black writer, it was generally assumed that ‘racism was all I was qualified to write about’. She pointed out that character ethnicity is never explicitly referenced in Noughts and Crosses, and many readers take different meanings from the theme of segregation in the text. This, she says, is a sign that ‘the face is of hatred is always the same’.

Although she praised the work of other writers such as Benjamin Zephaniah and Bali Rai for depicting characters from ethnic, minority backgrounds, Blackman stressed that further diversity was needed in order to accurately reflect multicultural Britain and celebrate ‘differences but also, more importantly, similarities’.

Top quotes:

On her experiences of racism: ‘They’d come up to me and say,“Go back to where you came from!” and I’d confusedly reply, “Well, I come from Clapham”.’

‘It’s terrible, if you asked me for a children’s book that had, say, a Chinese protagonist, I would really struggle to find one.’

 Rupert Everett treated a sell-out audience at the Hay Festival to a selection of his trademark indiscretions about fellow celebrities. The actor and author spoke about his writing, desire for fame and plans to make a film about the last years of Oscar Wilde’s life.

Despite exclaiming at the beginning of his event that he ‘couldn’t even get arrested in Hollywood these days’, Everett was nevertheless able to let slip some hilarious and revealing anecdotes about celebrity life. During a conversation about his charity work in Africa for Oxfam, where he confessed ‘I didn’t fulfill my job and didn’t behave very well’, he told how an Oxfam worker said he was ‘the second most difficult celebrity we’ve ever had’. Everett, unable to resist, gleefully told the audience he learned that ‘the first was Susan Sarandon – though I probably shouldn’t have said that’.

Everett was also frank about the breakdown of his relationship with Madonna over the first volume of his autobiography Red Carpets and Other Banana Skins. He attributed their falling-out to his desire to tell the truth as a writer. He said, ‘I wanted to write about everything I loved and I loved her – I do love her. Famous people are so controlling of everything that is said about them, they find any hint of humanity brought into an interview deeply repellent… They are worth so much more than the bland PR exercises. All they will tell you about is the processes of their work… You don’t get a sense of them as living people.’

In a frank discussion of how Everett’s sexuality had affected his acting career, he said, ‘It’s not an ideal thing to be gay in movies – still. Once you can grab hold of a broomstick and be a witch it’s fine. When you’re young and want to be a leading man it’s different.’

The conversation then turned to the influence of forces such as Scientology on the movie business, which Everett addressed with candour.  He said, ‘I was longing to get picked up by Scientology. Apparently they turn you straight, which would be a plus… I was up for a film with Tom Cruise once and got through five auditions and then suddenly it went quiet. I think that had something to do with being gay.’

The event ended with Everett sharing his plans to write, direct and star in a film of Oscar Wilde’s final years as an exile. Describing the writer as ‘one of the punctuation points between the 19^th century and the 20^th century,’ he explained how his film would depict a very different Wilde living among the down-and-outs in Paris.

Top quotes

‘I do miss Hollywood actually. But the Hollywood I miss is no longer there.’

 ‘It’s very important to get paid. That’s the very slutty way of an actor.’

‘I was a forerunner of the kind of monster that is happening now. I just wanted to be famous – I wanted to be in a Jacqueline Susann novel.’