BBC Arts at Hay
This year’s flagship Hay Festival, taking place from 22 May to 1 June, with unprecedented coverage across the BBC’s domestic television, radio, online networks, BBC Cymru Wales and globally with BBC World News.
The BBC will run a full programme of events, which will also be broadcast over BBC Radios 2, 3, 4, 6 Music, BBC World Service and BBC Radio Wales and Radio Cymru. The line-up for the BBC Tent includes appearances and performances from Gillian Clarke, Sebastian Faulks, Amanda Vickery, Julien Temple, Cerys Matthews, Alfred Brendel, Libby Purves, Lucy Worsley and Monty Don.
This year there will be unprecedented BBC coverage of the festival on TV, radio and online under one single banner, making the festival more accessible than ever before. The One Show will be live from Hay for the first time; Martha Kearney will be broadcasting from the site; Talking Books will be on the road at Hay Festival for five special episodes dedicated to the festival. Presented by Razia Iqbal, the series will feature exclusive interviews with world renowned authors Toni Morrison, Jung Chang and Karl Ove Knausgaard. BBC Four will also make a one-hour documentary about the festival and book-loving town of Hay on Wye.
On radio there will be more coverage than ever before with Chris Evans broadcasting BBC Radio 2’s literary competition 500 Words from Hay; BBC Radio 3’s Free Thinking, In Tune and The Verb will also be live on-site alongside BBC Radio 4’s Front Row, The Write Stuff and Four Thought. For the first time ever, BBC Radio 6 Music presenters will be on site: Cerys Matthews, Gideon Coe, Chris Hawkins, Mark Radcliffe and Stuart Maconie. BBC Wales will also host live coverage and BBC Arts Online will take the audience to Hay, publishing daily content, including live streams of some of the headline events and daily festival digests, helping to further realise the BBC and Hay Festival’s ambitions for a digital festival.
BBC Arts Online
BBC Arts Online will offer the most extensive coverage ever of the Hay Festival, both live and on demand, supplementing and linked to major BBC radio coverage and BBC Arts programming on television, inaugurating a long-term partnership with the Hay Festivals.
BBC Arts Online will take audiences to Hay with two live streams of headline sessions daily featuring, among others, Jacqueline Wilson, Stephen Fry, Carrie Fisher, Toni Morrison and Michael Morpurgo.
There will also be a daily festival digest, our BBC Arts Online Haylights, which will include extracts from the best of the day’s sessions.
