The Guardian Hay Festival: Next Best Thing to Being There
It’s back to guardian.co.uk today for a double-treat: its extensive, ongoing coverage of the Guardian Hay Festival in Wales, running from May 21-31, as well as The Book that changed my life, in which Nicole Jackson interviews 28 festival participants, who each provide a paragraph on their crucial reading. The event is primarily literary, but features a wide array of public figures: authors, poets, comedians, architects and politicians. There is also Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury and Archbishop Desmond Tutu. The main page has a considerable amount of video and podcasts, as well as blogs and articles about the festival. One of the presenters has proved unexpectedly timely: poet Ruth Padel, who in controversy resigned her position as the first female Professor of Poetry at Oxford University only nine days after being elected. Read more in the Guardian’s May 26 interview, Ruth Padel: Oxford poetry smear campaign could have been a conspiracy. She is also the great-great-granddaughter of Charles Darwin, and you can see a video of her reading from Darwin: A Life in Poems. The Book that changed my life surveys a cross-section of people, including the novelist Zoe Heller, historians Simon Schama and Antonia Fraser, and Alain de Botton, whom I featured in an earlier post. I’ll leave it to you to read the books that changed their lives and those of the other interviewees, but suffice to say that it’s a pretty eclectic and surprising list. It would be wonderful to attend this festival in person, but for most of us that’s not practical. Thank goodness we live in an age when technology allows us the next best thing.
August 12th, 2010 at 8:41 am
[...] Last year I enjoyed blogging about my virtual experience of the Guardian Hay Festival. It has already taken place this year, but those of us who missed it in person can still enjoy it online. The Guardian still has lots of material – text, photos, audio and video – on its site for the event. The text offerings include a brief wrap-up piece, Best of the Hay Festival 2010. Hay is more than author readings. It’s also about book-buying, as driven home by the photo essay Used books, new books, looking for the perfect book … and the videos representing the Hay Festival Bookshop Challenge, including this one featuring Val McDermid. Continuing the video theme is a section of short author interviews, such as this one with Alexander McCall Smith, on Sky Arts’ The Book Show. The others in the series include McDermid, Simon Schama, Audrey Niffenegger, Bill Bryson and more. There is another photo essay in which festival-goers answer the question What Are You Reading at the Hay Festival? An extensive section of audio Haycasts features author interviews from this year, 2009 and 2008. I was happy to see one particular video from The Book Show that exemplifies the concept of Living in More Than One World: an interview with Brian May, the guitarist of Queen, who also happens to have a Ph.D. in astrophysics and is an author. The video snippet describes the recent book he co-authored with Elena Vidal, A Village Lost and Found. The Hay Festival material serves as a reminder that the extensive Guardian Books site is always worth a virtual visit. You can easily lose yourself in new and older articles, reviews, blogs, special features, audio and video. And if you still want more of the Hay virtual experience, go back to the Guardian’s main page for Hay, to access links for its coverage going back to 2006. [...]