Emma Thompson has been awarded this year's Hay Festival Medal for Drama, receiving the honour at Hay Festival in Hay-on-Wye during a conversation that turned into a portrait of the books and voices that shaped her. The actress and writer spoke with author Elizabeth Day about the novels that helped build her imagination, then used the moment to trace the path from childhood reading to a career that has moved between screen and literature.
The medal lands at a moment when Thompson's name still carries weight far beyond the festival field. Hay Festival chief executive Julie Finch praised her intelligence, wit, humour and fearless storytelling, saying her work has given audiences real insight into humanity. For a festival that places writing and performance side by side, the award recognises someone whose career has long sat at that junction.
Thompson said the first novel she was inspired by was Beatrix Potter's The Tale of Mr Todd, even with its darker themes. She said she and her siblings would deliberately choose long bedtime stories so they could spend more time listening to their father read aloud, remembering his voice as honeyed. Those evenings, she said, helped shape a lifelong love of language and storytelling. She also said Potter mattered to her because the writing did not talk down to children or patronise them, and that she felt very, very lucky to have been raised by parents who never did.
That affection for books came with a sharper edge. Thompson said she was drawn to Jane Austen and fantasy writers too, but many of the female characters she encountered left her conflicted about her own identity. “I didn't fit any of the patterns of any of the characters I was reading in my favourite books,” she said, describing a period when she could not find a version of womanhood that matched her own appetites or sense of self. Books, she said, devoured her; she could not stop reading them and was addicted to story.
The award gives that private history public form. It also leaves one question hanging in the air after the applause fades: which book, if any, will Thompson choose as the next project to match the feminist retelling of the Iliad she has been developing for the big screen. For now, Hay Festival has given her a medal for drama, and Thompson has answered with the kind of testimony that explains why.
