Hay Festival Podcast

The novelist Hilary Mantel discusses The Mirror and the Light, the third book in her Thomas Cromwell trilogy with Peter Florence. The interview was recorded at Hay Festival Digital on 30 May 2020, where Hilary was awarded the Hay Festival Medal for Prose.

The Hay Festival Podcast is supported by Baillie Gifford Investment Managers. Full-length Festival events can be watched over at hayfestival.org/hayplayer. Contact us at [email protected] or on Twitter, Instagram or Facebook @hayfestival.

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The legendary and deeply inspiring writer and activist Gloria Steinem discusses her memoir The Truth Will Set You Free, But First It Will Piss You Off: Thoughts on Life, Love and Rebellion with the founder of The Everyday Sexism Project.

The Hay Festival Podcast is supported by Baillie Gifford Investment Managers. Full-length Festival events can be watched over at hayfestival.org/hayplayer. Contact us at [email protected] or on Twitter, Instagram or Facebook @hayfestival.

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Michael Morpurgo’s compelling Hay Library Lecture is a marvel of storytelling, an impassioned argument for the rights of every child to have access to books and education, and a celebration of his novel I Believe in Unicorns.

The Hay Festival Podcast is supported by Baillie Gifford Investment Managers. Full-length Festival events can be watched over at hayfestival.org/hayplayer. Contact us at [email protected] or on Twitter, Instagram or Facebook @hayfestival.

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Matthew Francis’ re-telling of the first four stories of the Welsh classic The Mabinogi is the first to situate it in poetry, and captures the magic and strangeness of this medieval Celtic world. Permeating the whole sequence is a delight in the power of the imagination to transform human experience into works of tragedy, comedy and wonder. Chaired by Daniel Hahn. Francis’ new poetry collection WING is out now from Faber.

The Hay Festival Podcast is supported by Baillie Gifford Investment Managers. Full-length Festival events can be watched over at hayfestival.org/hayplayer. Contact us at [email protected] or on Twitter, Instagram or Facebook @hayfestival.

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A conversation with the social historian Hallie Rubenhold describing how she mined untapped Victorian sources to illuminate the stories of the women murdered by Jack the Ripper in her Baillie Gifford Prize-winning The Five.

The Hay Festival Podcast is supported by Baillie Gifford Investment Managers. Full-length Festival events can be watched over at hayfestival.org/hayplayer. Contact us at [email protected] or on Twitter, Instagram or Facebook @hayfestival.

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A compelling and hilarious rallying call for our times from journalist and superstar author Caitlin Moran tackling topics as pressing and diverse as a women only language, revolution, flawed heroes and the reasons the internet is like a drunken toddler, in conversation with Stephanie Merritt.

Moran’s books include her multi-award-winning bestseller How to Be a Woman, her two volumes of collected journalism, Moranthology and Moranifesto, and her novel, How to Build a Girl.

The Hay Festival Podcast is supported by Baillie Gifford Investment Managers. Full-length Festival events can be watched over at hayfestival.org/hayplayer. Contact us at [email protected] or on Twitter, Instagram or Facebook @hayfestival.

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For #WorldBookDay, the day of Shakespeare’s birth, here's actress Judi Dench talking about her Shakespearean work and celebrating her album of great speeches, Exits and Entrances. The event is chaired by the great director Richard Eyre.

The Hay Festival Podcast is supported by Baillie Gifford Investment Managers. Full-length Festival events can be watched over at hayfestival.org/hayplayer. Contact us at [email protected] or on Twitter, Instagram or Facebook @hayfestival.

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How did humans turn themselves from hustling African apes into the rulers of planet earth? The Israeli historian and philosopher Yuval Noah Harari looks at the secrets of our success and explores the themes of his bestselling debut Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind in conversation with Rosie Boycott in Cartagena de Indias in January 2016.

Lecturer at the Department of History, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Harari’s other books include Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow and 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, available at all good bookshops and libraries.

The Hay Festival Podcast is supported by Baillie Gifford Investment Managers. Full-length Festival events can be watched over at hayfestival.org/hayplayer. Join us on Twitter, Instagram or Facebook @hayfestival.

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The Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, author of Half of a Yellow Sun, Americanah and We Should All Be Feminists talks about how she discovered Gabriel Garcia Marquez. She responds to his statement “I am a journalist above everything else” in an intriguing exploration of how imagination turns historical fact into fictional truths.

The Hay Festival Podcast is supported by Baillie Gifford Investment Managers. Full-length Festival events can be watched over at hayfestival.org/hayplayer.

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Stephen Fry and the international human rights lawyer Philippe Sands discuss his award-winning book East West Street, a compelling family detective story and an exploration of the legal principles that defined the Nuremberg War Trials. The conversation is riveting and exacting and you’d expect that, of course. But it’s also hilarious, and the laughter is the light in this deep darkness. #ImagineTheWorld

Our Hay Festival Podcast is supported by Baillie Gifford Investment Managers