Rolling in the Hay

Our coverage of the final days of this year’s Hay Festival begins today. Here’s a selection of facts and myths about the world’s grandest literary festival.

1) This year’s reconciliation between Paul Theroux and V.S. Naipaul joins a long list of memorable events at the festival. In 2009, Ruth Padel held her resignation press conference at Hay to explain why she was stepping down from being Oxford Professor of Poetry. The year before, Gary Kasparov publicly slated Western governments for turning a blind-eye to Russian corruption.

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2) The festival has glamorous friends. Former US President, Bill Clinton, famously labelled it ‘the Woodstock of the mind’. In 2009, Stephen Fry was so keen to get there he avoided the traffic by arriving via helicopter. Such star-power helps to make Hay the most profitable literary festival in Britain, beating Bath, Edinburgh and Cheltenham, with a turnover