Hay Festival Tales
Marcus du Sautoy has been named by the Independent on Sunday as one of the UK's leading scientists, has written extensively for the Guardian, The Times and the Daily Telegraph and has appeared on Radio 4 on numerous occasions. In 2008 he was appointed to Oxford University’s prestigious professorship as the Simonyi Chair for the Public Understanding of Science, a post previously held by Richard Dawkins. In his new book, Around the World in 80 Games, he explores the maths behind the games we love to play, and why we love to play them. Spanning millennia, countries and cultures, he discovers how maths and games have been integral to human psychology and culture.
Ayanna Lloyd Banwo is a writer from Trinidad & Tobago. She is a graduate of the University of the West Indies and holds an MA in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia, where she is now a Creative and Critical Writing PhD student. Her work has been published in Moko Magazine, Small Axe, PREE, Callaloo and Anomaly among others, and shortlisted for Small Axe Literary Competition and the Wasafiri New Writing Prize. When We Were Birds is her first novel; she is currently working on her second.
Laura Bates is a Sunday Times bestselling author and campaigner. She has written for the Guardian, the Independent, the New Statesman, Red Magazine and Grazia among others. She is also contributor at Women Under Siege, a New-York based organisation working to combat the use of sexual violence as a tool of war in conflict zones worldwide. She is the founder of the Everyday Sexism Project. Her latest book, The New Age of Sexism, is an urgent and eye-opening investigation into new AI-driven technologies, and how they are putting women in danger.
Oliver Bullough is a prize-winning journalist and author from Wales, who specialises in the former Soviet Union and corruption. His work appears in the Guardian, the New York Times, GQ magazine, Prospect and elsewhere, and he regularly appears on the BBC, Sky News, CNN and other media outlets. His books include Moneyland, about which John le Carré said: "If you want to know why international crooks and their eminently respectable financial advisors walk tall and only the little people pay taxes, this is the ideal book for you" and most recently Butler to the World.
Onjali Q. Raúf is a bestselling children’s author and human rights activist. She is the founder and CEO of two NGO’s: Making Herstory, an organisation working to end all forms of domestic violence, abuse and trafficking crimes perpetrated against women and children; and O’s Refugee Aid Team, through which she mobilises aid convoys and funds to help refugees surviving across northern France and beyond. She is the author of The Boy at the Back of the Class (Orion Children’s Books, 2018), which won the 2019 Blue Peter Award and the Waterstones Children’s Book Prize, The Star Outside My Window (Orion Children’s Books, 2019), The Day We Met The Queen (World Book Day, 2020), The Night Bus Hero (Orion Children’s Books, 2020), The Great (Food) Bank Heist (Barrington Stoke, 2021), and The Lion Above the Door (Orion Children’s Books, 2021).
Dr Adam Rutherford is a science writer and broadcaster. He studied genetics at University College London, and during his PhD on the developing eye, he was part of a team that identified the first genetic cause of a form of childhood blindness. He has written and presented many award-winning series and programmes for the BBC, including the flagship weekly BBC Radio 4 programme Inside Science and The Curious Cases of Rutherford & Fry with Dr Hannah Fry. He is the author of Creation, which was shortlisted for the Wellcome Trust Prize, A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived, The Book of Humans and How to Argue with a Racist.
Caryl Lewis is a multi-award-winning Welsh novelist, children's writer, playwright and screenwriter. Her breakthrough novel Martha, Jac a Sianco (2004) is widely regarded as a modern classic of Welsh literature, and sits on the Welsh curriculum. The film adaptation - with a screenplay by Lewis herself - went on to win six Welsh BAFTAS and the Spirit of the Festival Award at the 2010 Celtic Media Festival. Lewis's other screenwriting work includes BBC/S4C thrillers Hinterland and Hidden. Lewis is a visiting lecturer in Creative Writing at Cardiff University, and lives with her family on a farm near Aberystwyth. Drift is her debut novel in the English language.
Natalie Haynes is a broadcaster and author of six books, most recently Pandora’s Jar: Women and the Greek Myths (2020) and A Thousand Ships, which was longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2020.
Chris Power is the author of the novel A Lonely Man (a Washington Post and New Statesman book of the year) and the short story collection Mothers (longlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize, shortlisted for the Edge Hill Short Story Prize). His fiction has appeared in Granta, The Stinging Fly, The Dublin Review, and The White Review, and been broadcast on BBC Radio 4. He writes for various newspapers and magazines and can sometimes be heard presenting Radio 4’s Open Book. He lives in London.
Zelda Perkins has been campaigning since 2017 when she was the first woman to break an NDA, signed decades earlier, with Harvey Weinstein. She is the co-founder of Can't Buy My Silence, bringing the systematic abuse of NDAs to the attention of the British Government and international press and pushing the England and Wales Solicitors Regulatory Authority to take disciplinary action against the lawyer who created her NDA for Weinstein. She was named a Person of the Year by Time magazine in 2017 and by the Guardian in 2020.