Hay Festival
annual literature festival held in Hay-on-Wye, Powys, Wales
The Hay Festival of Literature & Arts, or simply the Hay Festival (Welsh: Gŵyl Y Gelli), is an annual literature festival held in Hay-on-Wye, Powys, Wales, for 10 days from May to June. Devised by Norman, Rhoda and Peter Florence in 1988, the festival was described by Bill Clinton in 2001 as "The Woodstock of the mind". Tony Benn said: "In my mind it's replaced Christmas".
It has become a prominent festival in British culture, and sessions at the festival have been recorded for television and radio programmes such as The Readers' and Writers' Roadshow and The One Show. All the BBC's national radio channels apart from BBC Radio 1 have been involved in broadcasting from the festival, and Sky Arts showed highlights of the festival from 2010 until 2013, handing over the main coverage to the BBC for the 2014 event.
History
The festival was founded in 1988 by Peter Florence and his parents Rhoda and Norman. Hay-on-Wye was already well known for its many bookshops before the festival was launched. Richard Booth opened his first shop there in 1962, and by the 1970s Hay had gained the nickname "The Town of Books". From its inception, the festival was held at a variety of venues around Hay, including the local primary school, until 2005 when it moved to a unified location just south of the town.
The Guardian was the main sponsor of the festival from 2002 to 2010, succeeding The Sunday Times.
“Hay Festival” enters the record as annual literature festival held in Hay-on-Wye, Powys, Wales. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Festival, annual and literature can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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This entry incorporates text from “Hay Festival” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.