Add to researchHay Festivals
- Location
- Hay-on-Wye, Beirut, Xalapa, Segovia, Nairobi, Kerala, Dhaka and Cartagena
- When:
- Throughout the year
- Partner(s):
- Description
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As a global partner of the Hay festival, we work together to bring some of the UK's best writers to audiences around the world.
Click on 'Read more' to view a slideshow of photos from Hay Segovia 2011.Famously founded around a kitchen table in 1987, the festival continues to attract the most exciting writers and thinkers to this Welsh market town and, more recently and in partnership with us, to places as far and culturally diverse as Nairobi in Kenya, Xalapa in Mexico and Dhaka in Bangladesh. Hay Festivals globally provide an important platform from which to showcase the best of the UK's writers and develop international audiences. Each festival encourages a new level of cultural interaction all around the world.
In May 2010 we became a global partner of Hay Festivals and since then we have worked with Hay to bring the UK's best authors and thinkers to an international audience. The global partnership has seen festivals take place in Beirut, Segovia, Nairobi, Kerala and Cartagena, with the latest ones lauching in Xalapa and Dhaka.
To celebrate the launch of the new Hay Festival in Xalapa in 2011, we streamed the first live event from the Hay Festival in Wales to audiences in Mexico. The event was part of the British Council Series - Gillian Clarke's 'Nothing is until it has a Word' in which she reflected on her Laureateship, and the place of poetry in the life of the nation. Following the live streaming, Gillian answered questions from all over the world that flooded in via twitter.
Of her experience, Gillian, who is the National Poet of Wales said,
To hear a question coming through this very minute, from the other side of the ocean was thrilling...their questions made me realise that they are just my next door neighbours and that we are exactly like each other.
It was back in 2009 that we first invited representatives from Teamworks, who are now the 'delivery partner' of Hay Festivals in India, to attend the Hay Festival in Wales. This was followed by a reciprocal exchange visit by the Hay team to India and led to the first international Hay festival in Kerala in 2010, a long way from the kitchen table of 1987! Since then the festivals have received huge international following and writers such as Germain Greer in Cartagena and the Welsh award-winning poet Menna Elfyn in Kerala have enthralled UK and international audiences alike.
The Hay Festival is a wonderful space for writers, thinkers and academics from around the world to meet and exchange ideas with a passionate audience and to build lasting relationships. As the UK’s cultural relations organisation we are thrilled to work with the Hay team to support this invaluable cultural exchange and to help bring it to a global audience.
Susie Nicklin, Director Literature at British Council
See the Hay Festivals website for more information.
Below is a slideshow from Hay Segovia 2011.
