Hay Festival is set to host an event next Tuesday with a title that would have sounded unlikely at a book festival not so long ago: “Just Stop Oil, Palestine Action: A Public Nuisance or a Public Good?” That is now part of the bill at a gathering that once sold itself, above all else, on writers, readers and the easy prestige of being seen there.
The shift is visible everywhere in this year’s programme. Among the themes are “Hay Green” and “South to North Conversations”, alongside memorial lectures on “truth”, “representation” and “nuclear threat”. Even the lighter corners of the schedule show how the festival has widened its net. One event asks, “Are you obsessed with Romantasy yet?”, with the description noting that “Book sales are growing faster than in any other genre...”.
For a festival that still trades on literary cachet, that is not a small change. About a decade ago, when I was invited to speak there, Benedict Cumberbatch said hi to me in the green room and Ian McEwan was there topping up his coffee. The place had the air of a literary pilgrimage, set in a “pornographically pretty town amid the rolling sheep-studded fields and quaint little streets”, where the talk was mainly of books and the people who wrote them.
That is still part of Hay’s appeal, but it is no longer the whole story. The festival website now describes its catering as offering “sustainable catering, with plenty of plant-based and gluten-free options”, a neat shorthand for how much the event has aligned itself with a broader cultural and political mood. The programme has grown to include activism, climate-related sessions and other subjects that sit well beyond the old book-fair frame. The result is a festival that looks less like a purely literary retreat and more like an annual stage for the progressive establishment to talk to itself.
The 2024 sponsorship row over Baillie Gifford left what the writer calls an indelible stain, and it still hangs over the festival’s reputation. That dispute made plain how quickly Hay can become a battleground over money, politics and moral signalling. This year’s line-up suggests the organisers have not pulled back from that terrain. If anything, they have leaned further into it, even while keeping enough literature on the menu to preserve the festival’s original identity.
The tension is not whether Hay Festival can still attract writers or sell tickets. It clearly can. The question is whether a festival built around books can keep stretching into activism, climate messaging and culture-war debate without blurring the thing that made it matter in the first place. For now, the answer appears to be yes — but only because Hay has decided that being a literary festival is no longer enough on its own.
