Hay Festival: Books, Change & Resistance

The sky over the festival site is a roll of grey-blue and the fields underneath are sharp, freshly wet. Hay Festival’s white tents are unmistakeable between. When I cross the festival’s threshold the sun comes out like it has always been there. I arrive too early for my first talk so I slip into a tent where I am given headphones and pointed towards a deck chair. I catch the end of a short film and the beginning of another – part of the MUBI shorts programme which is running most days and is free to dip in and out of at your leisure.

The first event I am booked into is a conversation with the newly announced winners of the International Booker Prize, writer Banu Mushtaq and translator Deepa Bhasthi. Heart Lamp is the first short story collection to win the International Booker Prize, 12 stories chosen by Deepa from across Banu’s many collections written over more than three decades. Deepa particularly enjoys translating the short story form: “I love what you can do in terms of language on the small canvas provided by a short story,” she says.

“The stories directly come from the people,” says Banu, who has worked as a journalist, activist and lawyer as well as writer. The people she helps, fights for, supports, are all present in the stories she tells, stories which are not afraid to shine a light on violence, misogyny, classism and more. The powerful work has not always been well received: a fatwa was issued against her for writing these stories and she was attacked with a knife, a story she tells with surprising comedy and her trademark warmth. “There were no footsteps in the literature,” says Banu as she talks about how these stories came into being, so she had to begin by exploring.

Deepa discusses the process of translating the stories. Deepa and Banu are from different communities in India so the translation process began with research to ensure Deepa could capture the nuances of Banu’s community. “There are many languages going on in our everyday lives,” says Deepa, so she had to make choices about which words to translate, and which would find their meaning simplified by translation and needed to remain in the Kannada dialect they were written in. Judge Anton Hur is a passionate advocate for the quality this gives the translated book, one of “raw silk.” He continues, “If you don’t get any resistance to your reading, you become a lazy reader.” Facilitator of the conversation and Chief Executive of the Book Prize Foundation Gaby Wood agrees, “Reading is a creative practise, and this book really encourages it.”

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In Roisin O’Donnell’s new book Nesting a woman pulls her washing down from the line, scoops up her two young children and leaves her abusive partner. Speaking to author Cristina Rivera Garza, Roisin discusses writing intimate partner violence, and the aftermath of it. “How do you begin to recover your voice?” asks Roisin through her main character Kiara. She continues, “I’m interested in where she goes from this point on.” Abuse is often explained away (both in the context of the perpetrator and the victim) through backstory, through flawed characters with traumatic pasts - this is an explanation Roisin didn’t want to explore or allow.

“We lack the language to talk about intimate partner violence,” says Cristina. The pair discuss how the language of romantic love is so easily confused with the language of abuse, how often it is used to mask it. A lot of the damage that Ryan, Kiara’s abusive partner, does is through language which makes it hard to trust, unreliable. It is a powerful conversation that shines a spotlight on abusive partner violence at a time when, as Cristina says, “society has developed such a tolerance for the suffering woman.”

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“There’s no record of a society that doesn’t make art,” says artist and musician Brian Eno in conversation with artist and writer Bette Adriaanse.

But what is art for? What is the use of it? These are some of the questions the duo are answering in their new book What Art Does. Brian and Bette met at a dinner party and realised they had the same questions about art.

Bette discusses her objection to the hierarchy of art which puts fine art at the top, nail art at the bottom and furniture design somewhere in the middle, when in fact everyone is doing art every day, making aesthetic choices, imagining something and making it real. Art, says Brian, is to do with feelings but you wouldn’t know that from reading most books about art. “Play is how children learn, and art is how adults play,” they agree. “And that’s very serious.”

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“The scene of the crime is actually her body.” Playwright Suzie Miller (Prima Facie) and lawyer Dr Charlotte Proudman discussing sexual violence on a Sunday morning hits me in the chest. An ex-solicitor herself, and one who was at points taking ten statements a week from people who had experienced violence in order to fight for them to be offered therapy, Suzie understands the law and the way it fails people. She talks about the “consistency of recall” expected of someone in a court case when trauma can often make consistent recall impossible. The law’s positioning of fight and flight of the only valid responses to violence is also something that Suzie calls into question. Most women are more likely to freeze or ‘fawn’ (please someone in order to avoid escalating the violence they are experiencing).

Suzie’s work, and the conversations it has started, haven’t just stayed confined within theatre. The filmed version of the stage show is now played for all new judges working on rape cases at The Old Bailey, 3000 police officers in Yorkshire watched the show and spent a day talking about it and huge changes were reported in their ways of working, and a judge wrote to Suzie to let her know that she had rewritten her direction to the juries in rape cases to reflect the points the play raises.

We are an emotional room, and questions are asked with taut voices by people too close to the topic. It is the only talk I go to that receives a standing ovation.

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“Class is like marmalade,” says Clare Chambers (Small Pleasures). “It gets everywhere.” She is discussing her new novel ‘Shy Creatures’ with Andrew Miller (Oxygen, Pure) whose book The Land in Winter is also set in the 60s in Britain which Andrew says is an impossible time period to write about without writing about class.

The two authors discuss their relationships to writing and researching historical fiction with journalist Julia Wheeler. Andrew describes sitting down to write like getting into the sea, cold at first but then you’re off. “For me it feels like a haunting more than anything else,” he says of how the story comes to him.

Clare on the other hand says, “My characters are bone idle. They don’t write themselves.” Clare also talks about her experience of late life success, encouraging writers to keep going, keep writing.

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“You have to be slower than change to see it,” writer Rebecca Solnit says to writer and farmer the slightly star-struck James Rebanks as they discuss storytelling, change and the power books have to change the world. “I see time in much larger increments,” Rebecca continues. “Despair comes with amnesia,” it comes when we forget that change has happened because we are looking too closely. She reminds us where we were a few decades ago, and how much has changed in that time. There is still more work to be done of course, and she advocates for activism that looks at the “health of the whole” rather than trying to fix one problem at a time with indirect consequences.

Books can be a part of that change as well. “Books change the world all the time,” she says without missing a beat. “We’re storytelling creatures.” She talks especially about her love of the short non-fiction form and the creativity and unpredictability that it offers her.

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Catherine Airey's new novel Confessions which has put her swiftly and firmly on the literary map. Catherine speaks to Laura Bates about the shock of going from someone living in a small rural community to being a public persona. “I still get imposer syndrome,” she says.

The novel weaves it way across generations, and between the US and Ireland in a gorgeously complex structure that Catherine credits to uncertainty. If she got stuck with a character, a voice, the structure of a particular section of the novel, she’d start somewhere else. “As an author you’re having to make a lot of decisions that you’re not always that sure about,” she says. It could go lots of different ways, so you have to trust in the discovery process.

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Elif Shafak and Abdulrazak Gurnah start their writer-to-writer conversation at childhood. “Writing was an issue for me,” says Elif. It was common practise in Turkey to convert left handed people to right handed people as the left hand was associated with sin. These days she still prefers the keyboard to longhand. Abdulrzak on the other hand was taught to read the Quaran as early as possible. “You learnt to read the Quaran perfectly without fully understand what you’re reading,” he says. In Turkey, Elif experienced books being treated as criminal objects as government after government arrived and fell, and large-scale violence accompanied the constant political change. Abdulrazak had access to only a limited number of books which he read over and over. This limited access meant that books weren’t central enough to pose a threat worth criminalising. He describes his community as being so frightened that nothing they were or owned could pose a threat to the people in power.

The three r’s - rain, rudeness and racism – greeted Abdulrazak when he came to the UK. “The hostility was destabilising,” he says, but on the other side of that was new adventure, certain freedoms and of course more books.

The two of them talk about the difference between belonging and identity, preferring the former and the multiplicity that it allows them, the space it offers to grow and change. Elif talks about how rarely immigrants are granted multiplicity, how the rhetoric of Starmer’s government is so rigidly all or nothing, immigrants everywhere or none at all, as Abdulrazak characterises the UK as always being torn between “sanctuary and xenophobia.”

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Hisham and Diana Matar met writer Naguib Mahfouz at a secret venue in Cairo when Hisham was in his 20s. Mahfouz had been recently stabbed repeatedly in the neck by a stranger, and since then only met with his friends and acquaintances in secret. Mahfouz was quite deaf by this point, so at the intimate gathering the guests shouted at each other to be heard, whilst Mahfouz whispered responses and counted his cigarette allocation for the evening. Since the assault, dreams had become more vivid for Mahfouz and out of this came his book I Found Myself….The Last Dreams, which Hisham has now translated alongside photographs taken by Diana of Cairo, a city she found a muse in and photographed endlessly. The photos aren’t direct representations of the dream vignettes – “I didn’t want to illustrate any of the dreams” (Diana) – but instead are further offerings to this tapestry of a book, sewn between the text.

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“Resistance is not futile,” is the title of Pulitzer prize-winning journalist Mona Chalabi’s inaugural John Caldon Memorial Lecture. Unexpectedly Mona begins her talk by telling us about her recent disappointing guided Ayahuasca experience, led by a woman called Rominja or Sarah depending on who you ask. Mona’s experience, and her telling of it, is a strange hybrid of fact and fiction.

“The lines between opinion and news journalism are being dangerously blurred,” says Mona, as she discusses the journalism that has been written around the genocide taking place in Palestine. More and more, Mona says, fact is being defined by the whiteness of the person saying it.

Fact checking as it currently happens needs to change. Fact checking articles often state false claims first before debunking them, and statistically most readers don’t read past the first paragraph of an article. And fact checking ridiculous and offensive claims only gives credibility to that claim. Taking constantly about Trump instead of about counter movements “undermines our ability to resist.”

“If we want to resist, then we need to act together,” Mona says, which means we need “a shared reality.” Real factual journalism can help create that.

And what can those of us who aren’t journalists do to resist? Start hyperlocal (who is in your community? Who is vulnerable in your community?), offer the skills you have to the causes you care about it, and unionise.

It is an energising way to finish my time at the Hay Festival; reminded of the urgency of so many of the key issues we are currently facing but also supplied with the tools and the hope to resist in the face of a genocide.

Find out more about Hay Festival here.

Photo credits: Adam Tatton-Reid & Billie Charity