Our coverage of the final days of this year’s Hay Festival begins today. Here’s a selection of facts and myths about the world’s grandest literary festival.
1) This year’s reconciliation between Paul
Theroux and V.S. Naipaul joins a long list of memorable events at the festival. In 2009, Ruth Padel held her resignation press conference at Hay to explain why she was stepping down from being
Oxford Professor of Poetry. The year before, Gary Kasparov publicly slated Western governments for turning a blind-eye to Russian corruption.
2) The festival has glamorous friends. Former US President, Bill Clinton, famously labelled it ‘the Woodstock of the mind’. In 2009, Stephen Fry was so keen to get there he avoided the traffic by arriving via helicopter. Such star-power helps to make Hay the most profitable literary festival in Britain, beating Bath, Edinburgh and Cheltenham, with a turnover of £9-10 million.
3) Hay-on-Wye boasts an eye-watering amount of bookshops. Anything from around 30 to 38 according to recent estimates. The most expensive book found this year was The First Man on the Moon by H.G. Wells from the Cinema Bookshop, yours for £18,000.
4) Peter Florence, Festival Director, is the main man behind Hay. However, there is an unsung hero of the town. Hay resident, Richard Booth, is claimed to have begun the concept of Hay as a ‘book town’. Dubbed the ‘King of Hay’, he says he did so because of ‘the enormous intellectual importance of the second-hand book’.
5) The festival is not just the plain old Hay Festival. Starting this year, it is now the Telegraph Hay Festival (along with an aptly-named daily paper, The Hayly Telegraph). Previously it was the Guardian Hay Festival. Sky also films special episodes of The Book Show at Hay. You can catch clips here.
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