Hay on WiFi! Literary festival pitches up online

Huge crowds and packed marquees are a familiar sight at the Hay Festival.

But book lovers will not need to head to a field to enjoy the brilliant speakers this year as the event has been forced to go online due to the coronavirus pandemic.

The annual literary festival has moved from a tented village in the Welsh town of Hay-on-Wye to the virtual world.

But it still features a stellar line-up with talks from award-winning author Margaret Atwood, actress Vanessa Redgrave and comedian Stephen Fry. Some 80 live broadcasts and interactive events with more than 100 writers, historians, musicians, comedians and global policymakers will be free to view for the next ten days thanks to donations totalling £350,000.

Fiction and non-fiction writers from Hilary Mantel and Maggie O’Farrell to Philippe Sands and Steve Silberman will entertain viewers in lockdown. Miss Atwood and Miss Redgrave joined poet laureate Simon Armitage and actors Benedict Cumberbatch, Tom Hollander, Helen McCrory and Jonathan Pryce to mark William Wordsworth’s 250th birth anniversary with a mass reading last night.

Festival director Peter Florence said taking the event online had opened up ‘some extraordinary opportunities’ and the audience was much more diverse.

Mr Florence said: ‘Instead of watching a main stage production in a theatrical sense you’re actually getting writers talking direct from their desks and armchairs and that makes it feel really intimate... it’s like having a one-to-one with these writers.’

Mr Florence founded the Hay Festival with his father Norman in 1988.

Once described by Bill Clinton as ‘ The Woodstock of the mind’, the annual event invites guests to celebrate new books and discuss some of the biggest issues the world is facing.