“Filth or tragedy?” Hay Festival 2026 is a feast
- Finn Brown
- Jun 10
- 9 min read
Updated: 2 days ago
On my first day at Hay Festival, I arrive at the tent where award-winning writer Ocean Vuong (On Each We’re Briefly Gorgeous, The Emperor of Gladness) is speaking out of breath because I got stuck behind a tractor on the way. As soon as Vuong begins to speak all of that disappears. Everything Vuong says is silver and I am surprised these are not printed things, that they form in his head so naturally, sit on his tongue. He discusses his inspirations, the refugee women who raised him, these storytellers, “powerful, triumphant women” who saw “feeling as a system of knowledge.” And he talks about what he loves about writing. “I get to try, my vocation is to try.” He describes the process of writing as again and again without consequence. Where else can you do that?
The conversation drips with writing advice as he talks us through the sort of questions that he asks of his novels and of his characters, things like “whose mind is the legitimate mind?” and “can I service the idea from my experience?” But I am most drawn to the way he talks about the sentence, the zoom lens that he places over it. “I am apprentice of the sentence,” he says, discussing the way that different forms pressurise the sentence differently, prose asking something different of the sentence to poetry. “Test the sentence, see where it can break,” he says, encouraging the writers in the room to ask more of every sentence, to upset rhythms and creation friction, to complicate every sentence without making it feel like it’s showing off. It makes me want to go back to every sentence I’ve ever written, to warp and finetune them, to see what they can do.
As is to be expected, Ocean is not the only queer author on my programme for the weekend. “Whenever I say boy I mean girl, whenever I say butch I mean woman, whenever I say boy boy I mean man.” I am lucky to see one of my favourite poets Joelle Taylor several times during the festival. In one event she reads from her latest book Maryville which is set in a Maryville dyke bar which exists in a snow globe. “What would it be like if I could haunt my ghosts?” Joelle asks, as she reimagines her four dead best friends into the bar. The collections begins in the 1950s at a time when butches where being imprisoned for ‘sex by deception’ as trans people are being accused of now.
“Filth or tragedy?” Joelle asks the audience she tries to decide which poem to read next.
“Filth,” the audience shouts back.
Still, we are all crying by the end.
Joelle talks more about the book in a panel with fellow queer writers Santanu Bhattacharya and Kiran Millwood Hargrave. Kiran’s new book Almost Life is her second adult fiction book, a love story which began, as all of her stories do, with an image she couldn’t stop thinking about. Santanu’s book Deviants began as a short piece of life writing, but he wanted the freedom fiction offers. The intergenerational queer story investigates “what it is like today, and what it was like for people before us,” exploring “inheritance or the lack of it” in queer life. Because people have had to live in the shadows, stories have not always been passed on, queer history has been lost to secrecy. “Our writing is archaeology,” agrees Joelle. We are writing in “the gaps”, the evidence that is lost because people were killed and imprisoned for their queerness.
Santanu underlines the importance of history in today’s fight against transphobia and homophobia. If you don’t know your history as a young queer person who has grown up in relative freedom, he says, when they come for you, you won’t have the tools and the community to fight back. Joelle echoes this: “The project to divide us has been very successful.” She emphasises the importance of physical spaces these days and describes the snow globe in Maryville as “a safe space to be dangerous.”
It is a galvanising event that reminds us of the role of literature in the fight against the rising tide of hatred towards our community. We must find ways to connect. We must come back together.
“Sorry, that was a bit macabre,” says debut author Liam Higginson after reading an extract from his new book The Hill in the Dark Grove.
“It’s a macabre book,” says author and interviewer Claire Fuller.
A folk-horror novel set in Wales, the book follows an older couple who are sheep farmers. As the husband becomes progressively more obsessed with a buried object, his wife is trapped with this changing man. The book first took shape as a short story during the first Covid lockdown, inspired by the division of Brexit and the desire to return to a ‘golden age’, as well as the isolation of Covid. Place and nature are paramount to the book. Whilst it’s set in one location, the 12 chapters span 12 months and the place changes with the seasons. Liam was keen to explore “the idea that a place can go wrong.”
He received 25 nos from literary agents when he sent it out, but the literary agent who said yes to him led the way to a four-way auction from publishers. “It’s only takes one yes. Keep going,” says Liam, addressing the aspiring writers in the room.
Gab Torr is also a standout debut author at the festival for me. Their book Hard Place follows Billy who moves into a new flat share with a couple who want to form a queer utopia but don’t always practise what they preach. The book delves into complicated relationships and complicated sex, exploring “the hypocrisy of some queer social justice spaces”, “performance politics”, class difference and housing. “The housing crisis in London is a character in the book,” says Gab.
But just as the book examines what is wrong with the world, it is also “a hopeful love letter to community” and one that’s been firmly added to my TBR pile.
In a particularly fascinating panel, Hay brings together Lyse Doucet from the BBC, foreign correspondent Jon Lee Anderson and Iranian professor Maryam Alemzadeh, to discuss the political situation in Iran. The Chair, Guardian journalist David Shariatmadari invites the panellists to begin the discussion by sharing misconceptions people in the audience might have of Iran. Lyse counters any misconception that Iranians aren’t speaking up. She says they are worried about speaking to a camera but as soon as there isn’t a camera they speak their mind. And they want their voices heard, despite the “apparatus of repression.”
“It’s not a monolithic society,” Jon reminds us, “and people know their history. If you attack Iranians, they are going to fight back.” He also adds, “In the West we tend to view borders as something finite.” By attacking Iran as Israel and the United States did, all Iran had to do was activate its military in other countries.
Maryam outlines the governmental structure in Iran. Whilst US strikes have killed many of the top echelons of the Iranian government, the “flexibility, spontaneity and informality” of Iran’s government have allowed them to regroup and shift quickly in response.
In Lyse’s recent visit to Iran, her main takeaway was the depth of the economic crisis, with jobs being affected by war, and by digital blackouts. “They always say Iran can endure more pain, but they are suffering,” she says.
Jon reflects on the broader impact of the situation globally. Trump “betrays those he’s in dialogue with”, he says, sending negotiators in to have conversations and then undercutting them with his actions. After he didn’t win the Nobel Peace Prize, Trump said he was less interested in peace, Jon notes. But the situation in Iran has given Cubans some oxygen.
“This war was meant to topple to regime,” says Lyse, but instead it has made the Iran a lot more consolidated, stronger and in control of the Strait of Hormuz. “It really does seem as though the Iranians are in the driving seat,” agrees Jon.
Maryam ends the conversation on a hopefully note – she hopes that once the dust has settled, there will be an opportunity for greater moderation for the Iranian people.
More controversially I make the mistake of going to see Lionel Shriver speak, off the back of enjoying We Need to Talk About Kevin years ago only to find she is now an “immigration restrictionist” in her words, anti-immigration and racist in mine. An immigrant herself (from the US to the UK and then to Portugal), she describes the process of each move as being expensive and document heavy. “It is frustrating to watch a whole generation skip that process,” she says. “I go home and it feels less like my city,” she adds, because many more people are “foreign-born” and don’t speak English. I wonder how her Portuguese is getting on.
Her latest book follows a Honduras immigrant Martyna (she didn’t meet any Honduras immigrants to write the book, relying only on “internet research”) who is taken in by a New York family. The interviewer Nicola Cutcher is brilliant, challenging why Lionel has chosen to tell such a toxic story of migration in the current climate. “What do you want your words to do?” she asks Lionel. Lionel sees it as a neutral and balanced book, which Nicola disagrees with, feeling she was “pushed to mistrust Martyna. This novel is using your skill to sew mistrust.”
Choice moments in the session include her saying she has sympathy for people who feel they are surrounded by “people who don’t belong here”, that she would close down the asylum system and only give support to people who are “deserving” (will she be the arbiter of who deserves asylum?), that immigrants must have strong “economic profiles” and be able to assimilate easily, and that (white) people not having children is a problem because it opens the door for immigrants because (white) people aren’t replacing themselves. Her own privilege as an immigrant is not mentioned, except by an audience member whose question she dismisses as unimportant.
“I want to give you the opportunity to show compassion,” says Nicola, extending one more olive branch which Lionel doesn’t take.
The audience is divided between people challenging her stance on immigration and fans apologising to her for having to answer questions on this divisive topic, as if she hasn’t just written a book about it.
I also spend an evening at a poetry reading and concert at St Mary’s Church (“being an Irish poet, I read in Churches all the time,” says Scott). This year’s four Royal Society of Literature Jerwood poets Karen McCarthy Woolf (England), Scott McKendry (Ireland), clare e potter (Wales) and via video Roseanne Watt (Scotland) come together to read from their work, and share a collaborative poem they have co-conceived with musician Kathryn Williams. I love seeing mediums intersect, and the homemade cakes on offer at the back of the Church were delicious!
The following day author of Hamnet Maggie O’Farrell, discusses the transformation of the award-winning book into a film with producer Liza Marshall. “The first task is winnowing it down, taking it down to the pith,” says Maggie who co-wrote the film with the director Chloé Zhao. They discuss making the film, the immensely collaborative nature of it with 800 people on set, the cast and crew dancing to a track of Chloe’s choosing at the end of each week, the version of the Globe Theatre which they built, filming in the Forest of Dean, Paul Mescal directing the production of ‘Hamlet’ which takes place within the film – a method acting choice. “We all went on a journey together,” says Liza, and their passion for the film is palpable and infectious.
Later, sisters novelist and memoirist Francesca Rhydderch and poet Samantha Wynne-Rhydderch discuss their writing, and their shared forays into memoir in their latest titles. Francesca’s memoir It Might Not Be True speaks to her experience of chronic illness and the end of her marriage. “How do you write illness?” she asks. “How do you write people into wellness again?” Samantha describes her latest poetry collection Milk Wood Memoir as “a memoir of place really, a memoir of a landscape” that she has been in, that Dylan Thomas also lived and wrote in, and that is now disappearing into the sea.
Across the weekend I am there I visit Hay, the world’s first book town, traipse around exhibitions and second hand shops and markets, soaking in the buzz. At the festival, I buy too many books at the festival’s sprawling Oxfam stall and read them in the sun, Hay’s signature colourful festival flags shifting in the breeze around me.
As always the slice of Hay that I sample is rich on the tongue, the flavours layered and complex, lingering. I scribble down notes like recipes that I can take with me, recreate at will. I leave inspired, my belly full.
Finn Brown’s (they/ them) writing lives in publications including Queer Life, Queer Love 2 (Muswell Press), The Raven Review, Booth Journal, Annie Journal, Meniscus Journal, The Bombay Review, The Bittersweet Review, Penumbra Literary, Snowflake Magazine and Texlandia Magazine. Their writing has also been shortlisted for the Creative Future 2024 Writers' Award and commended for the Moth Short Story Prize 2025, and they won one of Spread the Word’s 30th Anniversary LGBTQIA+ Emerging Writer Commissions. They are also an artist and a curator, and a co-founder and editor at arts and literary collective t’ART.
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