The Town That Loves Books: BBC Arts at Hay

On the border between England and Wales

the market town of Hay-on-Wye

is now home to Britain's biggest annual celebration

of literature and ideas.

It's estimated that 80,000 people will come here

to enjoy a vast and eclectic range of events.

They'll also get the chance to mingle

with some of the world's most distinguished

authors, performers and thinkers.

There are authors being interviewed, long queues for book signings,

comedy, music and, like all good festivals, loads of mud.

In this programme we'll be hearing from the world-famous ballet dancer

who has written his first novel.

I can't be Romeo all the time.

Romeo must go.

Karl Ove Knausgaard, the publishing phenomenon,

is described as Norway's Proust.

I wanted this to be a literary suicide.

How we shocked a book group from Bristol.

-Oh!

-Thank you.

And we'll also be exploring a new take on the Bard.

I'm working on Shakespeare and Islam and people go,

"Shakespeare and Islam... Othello."

An exciting new generation of children's authors

and the rise of self-publishing and fan fiction.

Well, I wrote about Lord of the Rings

but I combined it with Bridget Jones' Diary.

And Stephen Smith has been delving into celebrity memoirs.

I've set up my confessional couch

here in the lovely BBC gazebo.

I'll be kiss-and-telling with celebrity authors,

including Jennifer Saunders,

Suggs from Madness,

and the Star Wars legend Carrie Fisher.

Whatever happened to Carrie Fisher? She used to be so hot.

Now she looks like Elton John!

So, whether you want to indulge your curiosity,

stretch your mind,

or just track down some good reads,

welcome to the wide-ranging world that is Hay.

They close the shops at five anyway, you know.

They do.

Hay has long been a mecca for book-lovers.

The town has an unusually high number

of second-hand and new book shops

and life tends to revolve around them.

This town has no fewer than 23 book shops

so, with a population of just over 1,800

that means there's one book shop for every 80 people.

When the festival at Hay was launched in 1988,

it was a relatively modest affair.

But under its director, Peter Florence, it flourished.

The point is the essence, the creativity.

Within a few years,

this small town had become synonymous with books and ideas,

so much so that, during his visit,

former US President Bill Clinton called it

"the Woodstock of the mind".

The backdrop to the Festival is the wilderness of the Black Mountains

and fields of grazing sheep

rather oblivious to all this high-octane, intellectual activity.

Inside, there are more than 700 events

crammed into nine days.

This year, one of the big themes of the festival

is the First World War,

marking 100 years since the conflict began.

So many millions of lives were lost

in an outcome so traumatic

that in the decades afterwards

few novelists chose to write about the conflict.

But in this centenary year

many authors have chosen to tell the stories

of the pain, heroism and sacrifices

at the Western Front and beyond.

The psychological aftermath of the war for those who fought

and then tried to pick up the threads of their lives

in the years following

has been preoccupying a number of novelists,

among them Helen Dunmore.

Her novel, The Lie, is about a soldier returning to Cornwall,

traumatised by the death of his childhood friend,

killed beside him in a shell hole.

It's interesting that we have so much poetry

written during the First World War,

but very few novels in the immediate aftermath.

That's one of the things that interests me as a novelist,

is that silence.

And why there was the silence

and also how to break it, how can it be broken?

It's very natural, I think,

that people came back from the trenches

and they felt those at home couldn't and wouldn't understand

what they had experienced.

One of the ideas you explore in your novel The Lie

is the way that the war endures

long after the conflict has ended.

Yes, we tend to think of the duration as being 1914 to 1918.

Of course, technically, that's right,

but I would argue that the aftershocks, the echoes of that war,

have gone on and on for generations.

And that's why, when we look back and we commemorate,

we're not looking at something that has nothing to do with us,

that's a strange place far off,

we're looking at what has made us.

And the experience of the First World War generation

is now more widely available to us

than at any point since the conflict ended,

with so much material being available to access online,

something Helen Dunmore made full use of

in researching The Lie.

Voices that have been closed up in archives for decades

are now being heard worldwide.

Maybe that can be part of our commemoration,

actually listening and thinking

and wanting to hear,

wanting to break that silence.

The trauma of returning soldiers is also the focus

of the first two books in a trilogy of novels by Louisa Young.

It doesn't have a lot of war in it,

because I'm not interested in explosions,

but I'm very interested in...

aftermath and results

and how people can actually survive.

Her central character had half his face blown away.

With trench warfare, you know,

your head is the most vulnerable part,

especially if they didn't even have helmets until sometime in 1915.

So...

Suddenly there was a flood of these young men

with very bashed-up faces.

If your face is shot to bits, how are you going to eat?

How are you going to speak? To breathe?

All these things will need attending to.

The novel explores the early pioneering days

of reconstructive surgery.

They were learning on the go,

working all the hours God sends and...

You just sit there and think, well, who is more brilliant here?

Who is more of a hero?

The surgeon inventing all this stuff and doing it and his staff,

or the man who has to be strong enough

to submit to having all that done to him?

In Kamila Shamsie's novel, A God In Every Stone,

the wounded protagonist Qayyum

has a different kind of trauma to deal with.

One that is as much political as personal.

Qayyum's a young Indian soldier

who's fighting on the Western Front for the British Empire

and he loses an eye and has to go to Brighton,

is in hospital there,

and starts to question his loyalty to Empire.

Qayyum is someone who goes from being an unthinking soldier of the Empire

who will go and kill an enemy he doesn't know,

to one who becomes aware that, as an Indian soldier,

he's being treated differently than the English soldiers,

which first makes him question

the whole idea of Empire and loyalty.

But then he's also struck by another soldier, who says,

"If a man must die defending a land,

"let the land be his land, the people his people."

And this has a big impact on him.

It's been actually quite nice

to be able to talk about the Indian soldiers' contribution.

In this country it's mainly about people from Britain

ho fought in the war, or we talk of it as a European war,

but there were reasons it was a world war.

Half a million Indian soldiers went and fought in it.

The first two days of this year's Hay Festival

were devoted to children's books.

There has been near mass hysteria here

as children come face to face with their favourite authors,

a sign that the written word is alive and well

for at least some of the younger generation.

But with so many computer games and social media

how can books continue to compete for their attention?

Around 6,000 children from all over the country

have been bussed into Hay

to take part in the festival's

extensive programme of events for schools.

For two days, the festival's venues

are alive with the sound of excited children

who have been given the opportunity

to meet some of Britain's most distinguished authors

of children's books.

The children here have been thrilled

to meet their literary heroes.

I think the best thing about it

is that it encourages the younger audience

to maybe read books or write books

when usually at this age it's when people usually go off books,

but this could actually help them get back into them.

It's a really good vibe, there's lots of people smiling and eating.

-Enjoying it, basically, and laughing.

-Enjoying themselves.

Enthusiastic responses like those are welcome,

given that books face stiff competition

from the lure of digital entertainment.

Some surveys suggest that literacy rates amongst children

have declined in recent years.

In reading, 15-year-old British children

have slipped from seventh to 23rd in the international league tables.

It's a problem that's causing some anxiety

right across the educational establishment.

From your experience, is there a literacy problem?

I think the state of literacy is declining somewhat.

Each year a new cohort comes in,

their literacy levels are less than the year before.

Children who are coming in on quite low levels, twos and threes,

aren't reading.

They're, "Oh, Miss, we've got to read again!"

And if they are reading,

they're reading books that are way, really, below

what age range they should be at.

I think perhaps they are settling for really easy, simple reads,

rather than trying to challenge themselves a bit,

because they're not interested, not engaged, they're switched off.

How do you turn those attitudes around?

We try and turn it around by this - coming here, the Hay Festival, it's just amazing.

One of the great champions of reading for children

at this year's festival

is the American actor and author Henry Winkler,

famous for his role as the leather-jacketed hipster The Fonz

in the hit sitcom Happy Days,

Winkler has written 17 children's books

featuring the academically challenged boy Hank Zipzer.

The man who played a character

who was too cool for school in the '70s

is now on a mission to promote learning and literacy.

So I had the worst teacher.

Her name was Miss Adolf.

I think she was related. LAUGHTER

Given you've had great success with these books,

what do you think is the key to encouraging more children to read?

You don't have to remind a child

that they're not doing well.

They know all on their own.

So, if you support a child,

if you tell them it is all right

that learning is difficult for you,

we will figure out a way to get in there.

All of a sudden reading doesn't become a chore,

reading is not scary...

Reading can then be so much fun.

And this is very much based on your own childhood experiences?

Yes, it is. When I was growing up I took geometry.

I failed it for four years.

I felt bad, I was punished.

My professional life started on June 30th, 1970.

Not one human being has said the word

"hypotenuse" to me.

OK. Hypotenuse!

There you go. You're the first one!

But here it is. What were they thinking?

What did I need to struggle over geometry for

if it has never been part of my life?

And you had troubles reading as well.

I still do.

Reading is difficult, spelling is out of the question,

math so difficult my brain just doesn't do it.

So every child needs to know

they're not defined by school.

You try as hard as you can.

Once you get out of school, you soar like an eagle.

I was told that I would never achieve.

I was told that I was over, that I was finished,

that I was so bad in school

that there were very few chances for me in the world.

HE CHUCKLES

The festival's dedicated programme for schools

isn't the only offering for youngsters at Hay.

It's followed by Hay Fever,

a series of special sessions featuring star writers.

Among the most coveted tickets this year are for Cressida Cowell,

whose How To Train Your Dragon books

have sold nearly 7 million copies worldwide

and have been turned into a series of blockbusters

by the Hollywood studio DreamWorks.

-Do we go back?

-We've nowhere to go,

nothing to sell,

and no heads to call our own.

If we don't turn up with dragons, and fast...

Aaagh!

Careful what you wish for!

Do you think that is a way of introducing children

to reading nowadays, through film?

One of the wonderful things about the books being made into films

is that you get a lot of readers

who have come into my books

from seeing the films, and that's so exciting.

One of the reasons I write the books

is I want to get children excited about reading.

I actually get a lot of readers who have seen the films,

they love the characters,

and so they think it's worth their time and effort

to try the books.

So given all the competition that there is in modern childhood,

how do you grab a child's attention?

What I do is I make it very visual.

So, I'm an illustrator as well so I put in loads of pictures,

I put ink splats, so it's visually very exciting.

I tell the story in a different way

from the books that I read when I was a child.

-No-one can stop me now.

-Except for me.

We're attached, genius. Quit trying to steal all my glory.

-It's my glory!

-It's ruining everything.

-No sheep, no glory.

Gotcha! Ha-ha!

While Cressida Cowell's fiction is primarily aimed at younger readers,

another of the festival's superstar visitors

draws the majority of her fans

from what the publishers call the young-adult market.

Ask teenagers flocking to Hay whom they most want to see

and you hear one name above all others.

Here to see Cassandra Clare.

-Cassandra Clare.

-Cassandra Clare.

I've been talking to loads of teenagers at the festival

and I ask them which books they like and they go,

"Cassandra Clare, Cassandra Clare."

Really, you've been phenomenally successful.

Why do you think that is?

You know, I wish I did know.

When I first started out

and City Of Bones was my first book,

I didn't expect anything like the response that I did get.

When I talk to kids about it,

I think that the big answer that I usually get

is they can relate to the characters.

There is a fantastical setting with fairies and warlocks

and werewolves and vampires and magical spells,

but they very much feel that the characters are grounded

in the reality of real teenagers and their real lives

and so they relate to their problems.

Cassandra rose to fame after writing what's known as fan fiction,

an online literary phenomenon

in which enthusiasts of popular literary works

write their own sequels and spin-offs,

often featuring the same characters

as those that appear in their favourite books.

Well, I wrote about Lord Of The Rings,

-but I combined it with Bridget Jones' Diary.

-Seriously?

Yeah, I did diaries. Bridget Jones' Diary versions for all the characters

in which they were looking for love.

That was fun.

And I did a story about Harry Potter

where Draco Malfoy and Harry Potter had to switch lives

and see what the other one's life was like.

Do you have people writing fan fiction about your books?

I do now. There's a pretty healthy fan-fiction community

about The Mortal Instruments and The Infernal Devices.

In the publishing world,

the emergence of fan fiction is an exciting development

that has the potential to propel talents like Cassandra Clare

to literary stardom.

And to create a new generation of writers for young readers to love.

-Hello. Who is this to?

-Ellie.

All these people waiting to get books signed by Jennifer Saunders

show how incredibly popular she is,

but also demonstrates the appeal of the celebrity memoir.

It's become an increasingly lucrative genre.

Stephen Smith's been to meet some of the stars

who have been making hay in the sunshine and indeed the rain.

CHEERING

Few could have guessed that Katie Price had it all in front of her

when she published her memoir.

The man who took the plunge

was Miss Price's first publisher, John Blake.

It was his punt that would transform the world of commercial publishing.

Most of the publishing establishment

are nice middle-class women

and the perception is, they will always tell you, men don't buy books,

working-class girls won't buy books,

you've got to aim at middle-class women to sell.

Of course, when we produced Jordan, there was this tremendous demand,

because the girls were longing to read something like this.

These days comedians, cooks, even TV presenters -

it seems every famous figure has a book in them.

What it takes to get it out of them is a sweet advance

and perhaps a ghostwriter to do the boring bit

of bashing away at a keyboard.

When Dawn French got in on the act,

she sold a million copies of her memoir.

Her long-time comedy partner Jennifer Saunders has followed suit

and released her own autobiography, Bonkers: My Life In Laughs.

I did set out to try my best

to make it as funny as possible,

rather than make it an autobiography.

It doesn't have the chronology you would expect,

so it just has as many funny anecdotes as I could muster.

Did you draw inspiration from any other such memoirs,

once you made the plunge and decided to write one?

-Your dear friend Dawn, of course.

-Well, Dawn, yes.

Because Dawn had done such a cracking one I was a bit put off, actually,

I thought, "She's got a really good way into it",

which is the idea of letters.

Hers was about letters to people

which incorporated bits of life and anecdotes.

It took me a long time to find a way into it

and I think mine deliberately was more lightweight,

but I hope I got across the fun we had.

I just wanted to get across the amount of fun I've managed to have

and that Dawn and I had.

-And the Ab Fab period. That was a riot.

-Actually bonkers.

It was the moment that Joanna and I both said to each other,

"Look, this might not last.

"We are in a kind of popular bubble here."

It was when it became a hit in America and we said,

"Look, if it involves a hotel and a free flight

"let's just say yes to anything."

And we did, and we had an absolute ball.

In the book you're almost apologetic about, as it were,

burdening the reading public

with another celebrity memoir,

because perhaps you have mixed feelings about those.

-Well, there's an awful lot about.

-There are.

From Bonkers to Madness.

The always-in-demand David Beckham

was one of many celebrity authors

to retain a ghostwriter.

But another famous face from London was having none of that.

I got an offer for a huge amount of money

some time ago,

but to work with a ghostwriter.

And they said it's the most successful ghostwriter of all time,

but it turned out to be somebody who'd written David Beckham's book

and I realised that I could have written David Beckham's book

and sold millions.

What persuaded you to do the book and do the book now?

Well, the first thing that happened to me was I hit 50 years old,

and on my 50th birthday I was lying in the bath

and my cat fell off a shelf and died right in front of me.

I suddenly had this epiphany

that half a century of my life had gone.

A lot of things started to come into my mind. I never knew my dad,

you know, he left when I was three. I'd never thought about death before.

How did you find the process of writing?

-Did you find it easy? Difficult?

-I found it extremely difficult.

Hats off to all authors and everybody who writes books.

But I also thought, you know, I'm a working-class person,

I didn't go to university.

Sitting down for me as a working-class person

to spend that much time in front of a blank piece of paper

seems to me like a complete waste of time,

because I could be over there actually doing something.

My intention is to absorb

every moment of my life the best I can.

# Oh, what fun we had But at the time it seemed so bad

# Trying different ways To make a difference to the days. #

I think the first kind of six or seven chapters are aimed at me,

and I think the last sort of four chapters

are aimed at what the publishers wanted,

which was something that would sell.

But I should say, if you get to chapter eight

you will find some kind of epiphany,

because I was really writing from my heart.

Carrie Fisher gave the world a great hairdo in Star Wars -

the Danish pastry.

Later she described her highs and lows - often pharmaceutical -

as Hollywood royalty,

the daughter of America's sweetheart Debbie Reynolds.

But even when Carrie Fisher was losing the plot,

she still told a rattling tale.

Did people say to you, "Carrie, you're out of your mind.

"This is going to ruin you. It's going to upset people.

"We don't do that in Hollywood, we don't do that in this town."

Everyone gets ruined in Hollywood.

If not, they should do.

-That's the point of it?

-That's why people go to Hollywood.

Why not say it first before someone says it about you?

Get your version in?

Well, it used to be that you'd say you were your own worst enemy.

Well, that's not true. People can say much worse stuff about me

than I could ever have thought of myself.

The best one was that I read, "Whatever happened to Carrie Fisher?

"She used to be so hot. Now she looks like Elton John."

See, I couldn't have thought of that.

What did you think when you came across that remark?

Well, it hurt my feelings but I thought there was something to it.

I don't know! You know, there was one recently that said,

"Carrie Fisher sort of gives me a bit of the creeps."

I thought, "I know what you mean sometimes!"

Carrie's most celebrated book, Postcards From The Edge,

which was adapted into a hit Hollywood comedy

starring Meryl Streep and Shirley MacLaine,

didn't exactly portray the mother figure in a flattering light.

What was the fallout from writing the books?

How did they go down with everybody?

Well, I had to apologise to my mom about the film.

She wanted, actually, to play the part,

-but Mike Nichols told her she wasn't really right for it.

-What a trouper.

And you've carried on writing.

I've just made another book deal, like, two days ago.

-But I've been blocked for a bit.

-Have you?

-What would be the cause of the block, do you think?

-Sick of myself.

You're over that, that's good, so what will the new book be about?

Myself!

The market may be changing, with smaller advances on offer,

but it's fair to say we haven't heard the last of celebrities

who put the "me" into memoir.

And now for a publishing phenomenon.

Zadie Smith says she needs his books like crack.

He's been described as Norway's Proust.

Karl Ove Knausgaard has turned his own life into a series of books

that have been highly controversial.

He describes his family in unflinching detail,

including the death of his father from alcoholism

and intimate details of his two wives and children.

Knausgaard's six-book cycle,

provocatively called Min Kamp, or My Struggle,

has gone down a storm in his native Norway

and is on the way to becoming a worldwide hit.

The first book detailed the author's adolescence

and the death of his father.

The next, his marriage to second wife Linda,

and the third, just translated into English,

tells of his primary-school days on a small Norwegian island.

The recipient of this year's Hay Medal For Prose

joined me to talk about the books' success.

Here we are at a literary festival

where, I imagine, you'll be meeting many of your readers

who know the most intimate details of your life.

It's very strange,

and I never imagined that would happen when I wrote the book.

I thought this book is going to have no readers whatsoever.

It's obsessed with details,

it is kind of description of daily life.

-It's incredible, the descriptions.

-It shouldn't be possible to read it.

It should be unreadable, really,

and I thought it was,

so I was so amazed when people started to connect to it

and to identify with it.

And...it still puzzles me why.

Why is that? I don't know.

Even reading it, I was puzzled.

The hours to make a cup of tea and all of these things.

In fact, I think the novelist Hari Kunzru

has said you're on the edge of being boring a lot of the time.

Yes, that's a good point.

And the controversy of the book meant that, particularly in Norway,

it was a literary sensation, wasn't it?

I was reading there were even days in offices and factories

when they had Knausgaard-free days,

they weren't allowed to talk about your books.

Yeah, I heard about that.

I wish I could have a Knausgaard-free day,

but that's impossible.

You know, there were a lot of problems

surrounding this book as well.

It wasn't easy, it was controversial,

and very difficult on a moral level for myself.

So when it first started to sell, I thought,

"I have to give away the money. I can't keep the money."

Then my wife said to me,

"No, you can't do that to us." So in the end I didn't.

And you've had quite an angry reaction

from some of the people that you've been writing about.

Yes, some of them.

If you are going to tell the story of your life,

you have to include other people.

If I could, I would have written only about myself.

There is no such thing as only myself. It doesn't exist.

You write very vividly about your own father's descent into alcoholism

and you seem to be suggesting

that there are parallels with yourself and your writing,

that there are similar self-destructive impulses, almost.

Yeah.

One of the mysteries and the starting points in this novel

is the fact that my father didn't drink until he was 40.

Then he divorced and he started to drink...

and he became addicted,

and he lost his job. He lost everything basically,

and moved back to his mother, and died there.

That has always puzzled me.

I didn't understand, you know, why and how.

Then I found myself being 39, 38.

I have three small children. I didn't feel any joy at all.

I just wanted to get away from everything

and even in a self-destructive way.

I needed to write about that to find out why that was.

Then I see, in my writing, there is a certain aggression in writing.

It is. I mean, for me it is self-destructive,

I know I shouldn't do it, you know, but I do it.

My wife says that I don't understand nothing

until I have written about it, and I think that's true.

But it's very strange.

How does she feel about your writing?

The second book, as you know, is about us.

She read it on a train trip

and she called me.

She'd read 20 pages and she said,

"This is OK. I can tolerate this. I don't like it, but it's OK."

The second time she called she said, "Goodbye, romance,"

because I am revealing all the unromantic part of our life.

And then the third time she called she was just crying, you know.

And I was crying as well.

She came back home and she said,

"We have to talk."

But she never said, "Don't publish it."

She never said, "You can't write this."

But she said, "WE have to talk," you know?

But now we have moved on and now we are back in line

-and making it work, you know?

-That's good to hear.

-Yes.

What will you go on to write next? There are six books now.

Your latest book returns to your own childhood.

-Is there more to write about your life?

-No. No.

I wanted this to be a literary suicide.

Actually every idea I had, I put out in the sixth book,

just to write them dead, you know, so I can't use them.

There should be completely nothing left when I have done the sixth book.

That was my aim - use everything.

Really? Literary suicide?

Yes, that was the way I thought of it myself,

because there is some rules in writing

and one is you should never use inner, main conflict directly,

and I thought,

"Why not? I'll do it."

And then there's nothing left.

If I'm going to write more, it should be something completely different.

I like the challenge and I like the fact that I could fail.

It's risky, you know, and that's good.

One of the more unusual things you can do at Hay

is to imagine yourself to be Dylan Thomas,

sitting here at his writing desk,

or a replica of it,

with old fag butts in the background,

empty beer bottles and some doodles.

So why are people attracted to events like this?

There are now 350 literary festivals right across the country.

We asked people from a book club based in Bristol

to share their impressions of a place that never fails to surprise.

The Hay Festival is to book-lovers

what Glastonbury is for music-lovers.

A place to rub shoulders with their favourite authors

and to share enthusiasm for books they feel passionate about.

One group based in Bristol

is making its first-ever pilgrimage to Hay,

and its members have accepted a challenge by the BBC

to read a book that they wouldn't normally discuss in their group.

They usually read novels.

We've given them the former Labour minister Alan Johnson's

critically acclaimed memoir This Boy,

winner of the Orwell and Ondaatje prizes,

and asked them to attend his Hay talk.

-Ah! It's a nice picture on the back as well.

-That's lovely, isn't it?

THEY EXCLAIM

-I'm very pleased to be reading this.

-Definitely a page-turner.

It looks more about his childhood than his life as an MP.

So, in other words, it stops before he really becomes an MP?

There'll be another volume, I think.

It's the influential years of his early childhood.

Oh, that's brilliant. Really interesting.

"As she cooked dinner on Sundays,

"the Bakelite switch on the radio would be set at number one,

"The Light Programme, for Two-Way Family Favourites."

"The period before Steve's departure

"had been worse than anything we'd ever experienced.

"His idleness and our poverty had grown more acute."

"It's beyond question, he said,

"that your brother will have to be taken into care.

"He's likely to be placed with foster parents and, as for you,

"I'm sure Dr Barnardo's could facilitate your childcare studies

"as part of a programme of care at one of their homes."

It's the day of the festival trip, and they're off to Hay.

We're very, very excited. We've read Alan Johnson's book.

We all liked it very much.

I thought that it was so brave

to be able to write about such difficult circumstances

and then to turn out such an amazing person at the end of it.

I'm just hoping it's not like Glastonbury,

because I don't like paddling in the mud.

When we came in, we happened to glance Alan Johnson going past.

It's that slight frisson of excitement when that happens.

First of all, my sister and my mother,

I was extremely fortunate to have two such women.

They were amazing women.

So I'm telling their story

and they were the ones that were dealing with this trauma,

trying to find my father, trying to get money out of him,

trying to get the bills down, trying to pay the tallyman.

They are genuinely the heroes of the book.

With the discussion over,

the group reconvened to have a final say on the book.

What I liked so much was the human story

and also picking up all the strands of his politics.

That was really, really important to me. Maggie?

-Let's join this reading group.

-Oh!

THEY EXCLAIM AND CHUCKLE

-Welcome. Thank you very much.

-Nice to see you.

-What a surprise.

-Thank you.

-It's one of the BBC's little devious tricks.

We wondered what this seat was for.

Just before you arrived we were looking at this and saying,

"Oh, you're so sweet, you haven't changed!"

You're the first readers' group I've ever spoken to.

You've come to the right place.

I would be very disappointed if you were throwing the book at me

saying, "Never write another word."

I thought it was a lovely story about your mother and your sister

and I so admired your sister

because, to take on that responsibility so young,

and do it so well, was amazing, I think.

-She's formidable.

-How much research did you do?

You must have prodigious memories.

I've always had a very good memory

but it's surprising what comes back to you

when you sit down to really think about it and go back to that age.

I was trying to live in that period and remember lots of little details.

I think when you look at what life was like in that period,

and you see what life is like now,

I tried to puncture this myth

of the '50s being an age of golden innocence.

This wasn't golden. It was terrible for women,

it was terrible for people from...

"No room to let. No Irish, no dogs, no blacks."

I grew up seeing those kind of signs.

Inequality ruled.

It's a much more civilised society now, I believe,

and that's credit to...

I'm not saying one political party produced that.

That's... If it's anything, it's saying that politics,

actually, in a democracy, is good.

It's messy but, actually, things get done.

Alan, this is really the icing on the cake.

We didn't expect to see you today.

It's a real pleasure to join you

and I'm so thrilled you enjoyed the book.

This is an amazing book, so thank you.

-I'm recommending it to everyone.

-Thank you.

For nine days in early summer,

this place gets attention from all over the world,

but how much do we know about the town

which gave the festival its name?

Stephen Smith has been exploring the place

which is both charming and enchanted.

Just a short distance from the bustle of the festival there's another Hay,

a place of ancient legend and myth.

It's said that a man has declared himself King of Hay

and he lives in a palace made out of books.

-Derek.

-Hi.

-Stephen. How are you?

-Very well. Pleased to meet you.

Could I see your kingdom?

Yes. It's King Derek, who believes it's his birthright

to be sovereign of the second-hand book scene.

I'm the only local born-and-bred book-seller.

I was actually born in Hay, in Lion Street

and, over 59 years,

I've moved 200 yards along this street.

In fact, I've given myself a title of Prince Fitzbooth Addyman,

a kind of bastard son of King Richard.

Are you carried through the town in a procession

when the festival's on?

No, I just walk about. I do a walkabout.

-A little wave?

-Well, "Hi," yeah.

Hay is a sort of living riposte

to this idea we hear all the time that the book is dead,

or at least the book is electronic.

A Kindle is not sexy. A book is sexy. It's got soul.

You open a book and the smell...

If you go into somebody's house and you see a wall of books,

there's a conversation piece.

If you go into a house and there's a Kindle, where's the conversation?

Oh, a bit of plastic.

Janet. Hello.

'Preserved for the ages in a secret chapel - icons of Welshness.'

The actor Michael Sheen is a hero in these parts,

as are his fellow thespian Jonathan Pryce,

the captain of the Welsh rugby XV, Sam Warburton,

and Celtic song thrush, Bonnie Tyler.

'Actually, they're portraits by Janet Lance Hughes.

'These kings and queens of the valleys

'have been on show at the so-called king of book festivals.'

This would be TV's Rob Brydon.

Yes, that's Rob.

Now, he's a very busy man,

how did you get time with him and how much time did he give you?

Well, I was with him for a morning

and it was enough time,

-because he's got such an incredibly...

-Lined.

-..sort of strong face.

-Sorry, yes. Just joking.

I like the understated frames

that you've given them(!)

I love Russian icons,

and so I love this sort of crudeness

and the kind of craftsmanship,

the sort of passion that goes into making an icon.

-This is your Faberge-egg room.

-Exactly, that sort of thing, yes.

Surely there's a special magic in this place.

Maybe there's something in the water -

after all, there's no shortage of it.

And "the rain it raineth every day" from Twelfth Night

certainly could be the motto for the early days of the festival,

as you can see from the River Wye in full spate here.

But that certainly hasn't dampened the celebrations

for the 450th anniversary of the birth of Shakespeare,

which is being marked by authors and actors alike.

The historian Jerry Brotten is appearing here

to share some fascinating insights

that have emerged from his research

into Shakespeare's interest in the Islamic world.

What kind of Shakespeare do we want

for this next generation?

Do we want something that's very parochial

and inward-looking and national?

Or do we want something that's much more outward-looking and global?

'If you look at Shakespeare's works, and the settings and characters,'

hardly any of them are set in England,

apart from the history plays.

He has this incredibly global and international dimension.

What I've been interested in

is thinking about the way in which Shakespeare is looking eastwards.

He's looking at the way in which Elizabethan England

really had this moment of encounter with what we might call the East -

Islamic cultures, North Africa,

the Ottoman Empire -

and how that erupts in the plays.

Tudor England started to look to the East to replace lost markets

following the excommunication of Elizabeth

from the Catholic Church in 1570.

One of the consequences of that is that she, or the Elizabethan world,

is not under the edict

of being forbidden to trade with the so-called infidel,

the Islamic Empire.

So Elizabeth turns around and says, "Great,

"I'm fighting for my political and economic survival here."

So she starts doing deals with the Moroccan Empire,

with the Ottoman Empire.

There is this extraordinary rapprochement

between the Elizabethan and Islamic worlds.

By the time Shakespeare had come to London,

the Tudor court even had a Moroccan ambassador...

a figure of some intrigue and great interest

to the Elizabethan public

and, possibly, to the playwright himself.

This is an extraordinary picture,

which is of the Moroccan ambassador who comes to London in 1600.

And it's remarkable for many reasons.

The detail that we're given... We're told it's in 1600.

We're given a version of his name, he's known as Mohammed Al-Annuri,

so we've been given a sort of Anglicised version here.

We're told his age, he's 42.

Over here it says in Latin

that he's the royal ambassador from Barbary in England.

And just a few months after this is painted,

Shakespeare starts writing Othello.

So when I think of Othello, I think of this figure.

He has the scimitar, the sword -

Othello talks about the scimitar and the sword.

He has this extraordinary turban -

again, Othello talks about "turbaned Turks".

And this is an elite figure.

Shakespeare is not exclusively interested in race

when he's writing Othello.

He's interested in questions about religion and ethnicity,

and that's what I think the Moroccan connection

and this character Al-Annuri tells us.

Whether they are here to buy Herodotus or Horrid Henry,

the thousands of book-lovers at this year's extravaganza

can't fail to have noticed

that they are living through momentous times

in the world of books.

Reading is changing for all of us.

The arrival of new technology and emerging digital services

mean that there are challenges for publishing

that are unprecedented in modern times.

But it isn't all bad news, as I've been finding out.

Electronic forces are certainly transforming the world of books,

making the digital e-reader part of everyday life for many of us.

This is the biggest moment in 500 years.

This is the biggest change in book-selling, in IT,

in writing, in print, in books, you name it, since Caxton.

This is a golden age of reading.

There is more reading going on now than ever before in human history,

on every kind of screen, every kind of format.

Contrary to the gloomy forecasts of the literary pessimists,

the readers' switch from page to screen

has been good for the written word.

New technologies have helped create a reading renaissance.

People were very nervous about e-books

and they made all kinds of dire predictions.

Actually what's happened is that the e-book

has been the saving of the hardback.

It has regenerated hardback sales

because the e-book has taken the place of the cheap paperback,

and what it has done is it has made people value

the printed word in book form far more than they did before.

Yet there is a paradox.

While reading seems to flourish, traditional book-publishing suffers.

Competition from discounting online retailers

and a sluggish recession-hit economy

have seen publishers' profits dip by £50 million since 2007.

The truth about book-selling in England is there's not enough money.

Compared to America, we're poor.

There's a smaller market, there's less money in the system

and so, for the first time in a long time,

publishers have cut right back

on advances on books which are speculative.

They now put money into cookery books, thrillers, celebrity books.

Those are the books which generate the turnover

and that's where the money has been going.

In response, some writers have made use of the same technologies

to self-publish.

Many writers are now beginning to realise

that they can publish and market and sell their books

more effectively as a self-published author

than they can working with a traditional publisher.

The web-based digital publisher Smashwords

has created a 20 million business distributing e-books.

Founder Mark Coker is evangelical about the advantages

this service can offer to writers.

Self-published authors enjoy total creative control,

unlimited distribution to a worldwide market,

and they can set the prices low.

A book is only a few clicks away.

It's click, click, discover, sample, purchase.

Instant delivery of reading pleasure.

It's clear that self-publishing gives writers autonomy

and let's them publish their works in an instant,

but while it's created a few bestsellers,

for most, it's hardly been a money-spinner.

We're publishing close to 300,000 books.

Some of these authors don't sell a single copy ever.

The average author in Smashwords

probably earns about 500 a year.

E-books may not be lucrative,

but they do give aspiring writers a real alternative

to the relatively closed world of mainstream publishing.

And readers too have more influence than ever before.

And that's partly because of the growing power of crowdfunding,

where members of the public give authors the finances necessary

to make their writing projects become a reality.

The online operation Unbound

specialises in this new form of publishing,

as its corporate video explains.

It's simple. An author pitches an idea for a book on the Unbound site.

You read the pitch. If you like it, you can subscribe to it.

It's involving the reader in a much earlier stage in the process.

Not as some people have characterised it,

as sort of interfering in the process, but feedback.

Everybody who pledges gets access to the authors shared on the site,

so we can share early drafts of chapters, early drafts of jackets.

People love that.

People love giving their opinion on what jacket we should choose.

With only 50 books published so far,

Unbound remains a small imprint.

But they've managed to attract authors

who've already had some literary success.

After 30 years as a writer,

Julie Burchill chose Unbound to publish her 17th book.

Hello, I'm Julie Burchill.

I was inspired to write my book Unchosen

because, since the age of 14, I've been obsessed with the Jewish people.

I read about my friend Katy Brand, the comedian, who I love.

She had written a novel and was doing it with something called Unbound.

And that occurred to me,

wow, if I sold it to them and they told me to do it,

even though I wouldn't get an advance,

I'd know the book was going to be published

and that would give me the impetus...

-To do it.

-..to do it.

So, I just went behind my agent's back, just slap, bang, did it.

So that was that.

If I can compare it to one book,

it would probably be Lynn Barber's An Education, which is a book I love,

but with more sex, more violence, and a lot more Jews.

Now, the route Julie Burchill took, of course,

isn't the entire future of publishing by any means,

but crowdfunding does bring together the power of the reader and writer

in ways that we couldn't have imagined just even a few years ago.

Over the past 25 years,

Hay has become a real international phenomenon,

spawning ten sister festivals in cities as far afield

as Budapest, Nairobi, Dakar and Cartagena.

And this cosmopolitan dimension

is reflected in the international line-up this year,

of authors, travel writers and musicians,

who add a dash of global glamour to the event.

Toumani Diabate performed on stage with his father, Siddiqui.

The celebrated Malian musicians delighted audiences with the kora,

a traditional West African instrument

that's a cross between a lute and a harp.

Meanwhile, a debut novelist took centre stage at Hay

and felt right at home.

Carlos Acosta is one of the greatest male ballet dancers in the world,

but he also has a passion for writing,

which began with his memoir about growing up in Havana,

the youngest of 11 children.

He's here in Hay to discuss his first novel,

it's called Pig's Foot.

The book begins in the 1860s

and takes in more than a century of modern Cuba's development.

Against this historical background,

Acosta tells the story of a fictional village

in the south of the country,

Pata de Puerco - pig's foot.

It's a huge sweep of the history of Cuba

but I think particularly striking are the early passages

-about slavery and the brutality of that period.

-Yeah.

I mean, it's a reminder.

I wanted to also explore the kind of ethnic group

that came into Cuba as slaves from these parts of Africa.

There was a lot of gaps in the history of Cuba that I didn't know.

And so I was interested

to look back and see what shapes the country then,

who were the heroes,

who were these personalities who actually shaped that past?

But I heard that you didn't read a book until you were 25.

That's right. My vocation, I was going to be a ballet dancer

because, at the age of eight or nine years old, that's all I ever knew.

Writing's a world that is relatively new.

But I like to tell stories

and I like to read great stories.

Your childhood was certainly a striking one,

the youngest of 11 children, a very poor background.

And you've told this story in different ways, haven't you?

Through your memoir and also through ballet.

Why is it important for you to go back and look at your childhood?

There were a lot of wonderful things about my childhood

that I wanted to recreate.

Also, at the same time, it was very raw

and there were a lot of picturesque characters

that you could feed from and try to recreate.

And very difficult for you, I imagine,

leaving that family behind, the Cuban culture behind,

when you came here to London,

all round the world, to pursue your career as a dancer.

It was always very difficult

because always what I wanted to do was be at home with them

and share my life.

But obviously my career took me to a different path

and I love my career as well, so how you get both - you can't.

At the end, I chose my career because also I needed to help them.

In a way, I needed them to have this kind of light of hope,

knowing that I am one of them, you know, who's doing very well.

What about dancing?

Could this be your last season coming up at Covent Garden?

Two more seasons as a classical ballet dancer.

And then there will be a new dance,

probably more contemporary, completely different.

But that's the course of evolution.

I can't be Romeo all the time.

You know, Romeo must go.

The festival's international content

also includes some outstanding travel writers.

As it gets easier to journey to far-flung places,

so it gets harder for writers

to find new and unfamiliar stories to tell.

Horatio Clare's Down To The Sea In Ships

chronicles his unconventional journeys

across the Atlantic and Pacific oceans

on two giant container ships.

During several months on board, Clare developed close relationships

with the vessels' multinational crews,

the hardy merchant mariners travelling the high seas

on ships operated by the Danish shipping line Maersk.

The book's actually about seafarers, the men who operate the ships,

and the ships are vast.

I mean, 115,000 tonnes. Takes you half an hour to walk around

and you've gone a kilometre.

And they carry everything that the world requires.

Given little or no shore leave,

the crews live together tightly confined,

sometimes for months at a time.

The men who operate them are very few.

There are about 23 people on a ship that size.

So, you live in a strange mixture of great intimacy

and the rest of it is this vast space,

full of cargo and engine and tanks

and whatever hazardous cargo you're carrying.

Navigating some of the world's most hazardous waters,

these seafarers risk their lives for the cargoes inside the containers,

yet often they have little idea what goods they're actually carrying.

Everything we're wearing, everything we'll touch today,

every piece of cutlery, everything in every shop, it all comes by sea.

It's cheaper to rear chickens in Denmark,

ship them to China to be filleted,

and then bring them back to be sold than not.

I felt fairly quizzical about capitalism to start with

and now I feel it's a sort of comical enterprise, really,

because it really is eating the planet

and these sweet man,

they don't know what they're risking their lives for,

and I'm not really sure either.

We've now come to the end of our journey.

And despite the downpours and drenches,

the crowd showed great resilience against the elements.

The rain certainly hasn't spoiled the enormous pleasure I've taken

from all the stimulating ideas and inspiring people

I've encountered during my time here,

sampling the unique intellectual ecosystem that is the Hay Festival.

Now I'm off to dry out.

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