A day at the Hay

An OCA Excursion into Literature

A day in the sun at Hay…it’s one of the selling points of the Hay Festival – photos on the website are focused on people under sun umbrellas reading their latest purchase and drinking cool lager. This is a risky ploy for a Welsh summer event, but it paid off for the OCA posse that arrived at the festival grounds on bank holiday Saturday. We’d come for the culture, of course we had. We’d come for the literature, naturally, for the heightened conversation we’d enjoy with each other after sharing events. But the fact the sun was out certainly helped.

My initial reaction to the festival when I arrived shortly after nine in the morning, was that the Hay organisers really took their business seriously. They moved the event to a large field on the edge of the town some years ago, and my previous experience of festivals in summer fields had prompted me to pack my wellies, but they stayed in the car; miles of green-baize boarded walkways had been laid and mud was at a minimum. The numbers arriving, even that early, were stunning – already the field was awash is people, all age groups from elderly book enthusiasts to families with small and growing children, but the organisers were ahead on that one, too. Big maps of the grounds were strategically placed, the signage led you faithfully to the tent you needed. Handy cotton bags were being handed out free with one newspaper purchase and there were plenty of places to eat and drink. Queues for the events overheated, so timing was taken back by quarter of an hour, to prevent the rush from one talk to the next. And the bookshop had a warren of entrances, each one numbered, so that those wanting their book signed could form long, rabbit-hole lines, each leading out of the appropriate door and tailing into the misty distance.

But something was seriously amiss for people wanting to meet other people at the event, despite the ‘meeting point’ directly inside the entrance to the grounds – there was terrible mobile signal cover. Calls and texts were impossible for most, and hotspot messaging almost as bad. Even so, I managed – by nothing more than telepathy, it seemed to me – to meet up with the OCA students who had planned to come, including Amano, a photography student, and Pat, a Creative Writing alumni. I was sharing a variety of events with four other people in all, each chasing their particular favourites, with me going to all of them so that we could discuss the subject matter.
Our first event was the Baille Gifford Lecture, a talk by writer Steve Silverman. Silverman’s book Neurotribes had won the £20,000 2015 Samuel Johnson Prize for a piece of full-length non-fiction. This prize aims toward writing that is…gripping – with impact, quality and originality. Silverman is a journalist specialising in science and IT, and students who would like to concentrate on creative or narrative non-fiction might like to note that he originally planned to write nothing more than an article on what seemed, at the time, like a ‘epidemic’ of autism in America’s silicon valley. After publishing, Silverman knew that he needed to know more. He has investigated the history of autism – particularly the history of diagnosis, research and political reaction – as well as interviewing parents, and adults on the autistic spectrum, unearthing a secret history, before reaching surprising conclusions and suggestions for the future that have fired the imagination of readers.
Amano’s first event was Talking about Shakespeare: 1606: The Year of Lear. James Shapiro talked to Jerry Brotton (another Samuel Johnson Prize-winner) about the inspired year of writing Shakespeare had in the politically troubled 1606, when he penned King Lear, Macbeth and Antony and Cleopatra. (Imagine that! Or rather, if you’re a student struggling to complete your next assignment, probably don’t think about it too closely, except to remind yourself the Bard was a genius.) This talk took place in the Tata Tent, the biggest venue, which reminded me of the size of a pop concert, with screens to allow those at the back to get a close-up view.


After a sunny lunch seated on the lawn (we didn’t have a choice, there were no seats to be had), Pat, Amano and I went to see the 2015 Nobel Literature Laureate Svetlana Alexievich. Her books about seminal events in Russian and USSR history have been hailed as “a monument to suffering and courage in our time”.
“I don’t ask people about socialism, “ she says, “I ask about love, jealousy, childhood, old age. Music, dances, hairstyles.” I have just read her Chernobyl Prayer in which she sets down the testimonies of those closely involved; the firefighter who died 14 days after the explosion, his pregnant wife beside his bed…the local people who stayed on, inside the ‘zone’ … “History’s sole concern is the facts,” she explains, “emotions are out of its realm of interest…I look at the world as a writer, not strictly an historian. I am fascinated by people…”

But it was Marlon James I’d come to Hay to see. Having read, and been consumed by, his 2015 Booker Prize Winner A Brief History of Seven Killings, I was very keen to hear his own story. A packed Tata Tent, including four of us from the OCA, settled expectantly, the chatter dying as one lonely man walked onto the stage and announced that James had been so sick that day that even after injections of adrenaline he was not well enough to appear. We came out of Tata into evening sunshine, all bitterly disappointed. Only Pat, who was camping nearby, was able to return on Sunday morning, when he was finally interviewed by Martha Kearney. I’d given her my well-thumbed copy of Seven Killings in the hope she might get it signed.

Pat said later; “I really enjoyed seeing and listening to Marlon James. He was in good form and very amusing at times. The talk was fascinating and Marlon obviously talked about some of the characters in his book…I couldn’t take notes as it was too dark. Anyway, there was a long queue for book signing but I was near the front so didn’t have too long to wait. He was very charming!  I said that you were there yesterday and was very disappointed at not being able to see him. He said he was also disappointed. While waiting in the queue, I mentioned to a young couple that I forgot to take my camera, seeing them with their smartphones at the ready. They very kindly said they would take some pics for me and email them to me, so we exchanged email addresses.”
So, thanks to the kindness of strangers, and the largess of a (hopefully) recovered Marlon James, we have wonderful pictures of this writer, whose book is a remarkable achievement, and a lesson in how to write the bigger picture. As a character observes, “Well, at some point you gotta expand on a story…You can’t just give it focus, you gotta give it scope.”
The Hay Festival in Wales has come to an end for this year, visit the website here for more information. To those attending next year take a tip from me and arrange meeting places before you lose your mobile signal. Remember to take a picnic blanket if you’re planning to eat on the grass, and don’t book too many (if any!) events back-to-back – I really regret not having time to browse the enormous Oxfam Bookshop, among other things.