Hay Festival 2024 – Feedback
Wasn’t it fun! Didn’t we all have a great time, saw an array of interesting events and bought lots and lots of terrific books!
Our sell-out Hay Writers Live! event took place on Thursday 30th May. A varied programme containing new works, with an emphasis this year on writing inspired by the creative exercises we do at our meetings. Our eager, well travelled audience was engaged, attentive and very responsive. A huge thank you to everyone who came along and supported us, it was greatly appreciated and from the feed back, we are so glad you enjoyed our work.
Hay Writers’ Circle is extremely grateful to the Hay Festival for it’s continued, unwavering support of our writing group and the amazing opportunity it gives us to share our writings with the festival crowd. We would like to highlight the incredible work of Hay Festival Bookshop Manager Gareth Howell-Jones, our magical venue door crew, our online media creator Bethan Evans, photographer-supreme Billie Charity, Program Manager par excellence Heather Salisbury, and of course, Mr Media himself, Chris Bone; all are a credit to Hay Festival and we would like to extend a special “thank you”, for all your hard work, professionalism and diligence.
Hay Festival 2025 will take place Thursday 22 May to Sunday 1 June, with the Hay Festival Winter Weekend, 28 November–1 December 2024, but you can re-live online many of the highlights of Hay Festival 2024 and before, with Hay Festival Anytime – CLICK HERE
Remembering Lyn Webster Wilde (15th February 1950 – 28th April 2024)
by Emma van Woerkom
Over the years Hay Writers’ Circle has been fortunate to receive creative help and direction from exceptional individuals. Lyn Webster Wilde was one of those. Her notable career as a Senior Producer with the BBC on documentary series’ including Brass Tacks, as well as a television producer and director on the ground breaking comedy series Revolting Women.
Post BBC Lyn bought and converted an abandoned Welsh hill-chapel and published 2 books. Her entry on the Royal Literary Fund website describes,
“Lyn Webster Wilde writes non-fiction and fiction, and something that walks the line between the two. On the Trail of the Women Warriors (1999) asks whether the Amazons of Greek myth really existed, while Becoming the Enchanter (2003), an account of her investigations into the hidden world of Britain’s native traditions, has become a cult among young seekers after truth… Lyn is a creative-writing tutor for the Open University and runs independent writing workshops in her chapel home, perched on a hillside in mid-Wales overlooking Brechfa pool and the Black mountains.”
It was at these all day workshops at Brechfa Chapel, often in good weather, sitting between gravestones as curlews flew overhead that HWC members crafted and pushed their writing under Lyn’s inspirational guidance. I never left without words of encouragement, a succinct critic, or a piece of writing that had a future. Lyn was always interesting and interested. She listened to ideas, she made us think harder, motivated our thought processes, always propelling us onwards for the better.
Her funeral service at St. Margaret’s Church, Newton St Margaret, at nearly 800ft above sea level and overlooking the landscape she loved, contained poems from Rumi, R.S. Thomas, T.S. Eliot and magnificent English and Welsh readings of The Englyns of Gwydion from the Fourth Branch of the Mabinogi.
I for one take this opportunity to celebrate the life of a truly remarkable warrior woman.
Thank you Lyn.
N.B. The landscape photograph heading this article is the view of Brechfa Pool Lyn’s Chapel overlooked. I took it in 2014 during a lunch break while at one of Lyn’s workshops.
Bella Bathhurst talks ‘Field Work‘
The Hay Writers are delighted to celebrate local authors and this month we will hear from Bella Bathurst about her recent publication, Field Work : What land does to people and what people do to land.
Bella is a writer who also makes furniture. Her books include The Lighthouse Stevensons, winner of the 1999 Somerset Maugham Award, The Wreckers, which became a BBC documentary and was shortlisted for the CWA Crime Writer’s Award, and Radio 4 Book of the Week Sound. Bella’s latest book, Field Work was published by Profile in April 2021.
Field Work by Bella Bathurst – “If the bureaucrats and the incomers saw this place horizontally then Bert saw it vertically. Down through the soil and deep through the generations. He saw the boundaries between his land and the next with the same us-and-them finality a Londoner might see the hidden borders of gang territories. This field here, this tree, this beast, was as intimate to him as family, but that field there belonging to his neighbour, that was foreign land, as far from him as the Arctic. This was home, that was away. For him, Rise wasn’t an income or a classification or a family or a business or a job. It was everything.”
For information about Bella, her books, furniture and more go to her website – CLICK HERE
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