Hay Festival 2026

You don’t get much in the way of SF&F content at the Hay Festival (or Gŵyl Y Gelli as we call it here), but thankfully they seem to manage to concentrate most of it in a single day, which makes things much cheaper for us folks who don’t want to see the celebrity authors. This year was particularly interesting for me as the genre day featured two debut Welsh authors whom I very much wanted to meet.

First up was Anna Fiteni. The Festival had put her on the tiny Spring Stage and not given her an interviewer. But that was probably for the best. The crowd she got mostly filled the tent, and an interviewer would only have asked her why she had chosen to write for children. She hasn’t, of course. The Wicked Lies of Habren Faire is YA fantasy. Anna insists that it is not Romantasy, and by the strict trope rules of that sub-genre it may not be, but her publishers are certainly treating it as such.

Without an interviewer, Fiteni had to fill 45 minutes by herself. She did so in large part by giving a lecture on why fantasy is important to Wales. If you want to get a feel of what she said, she has a post on LitHub covering much of the same ground. Despite being understandably nervous (first Hay, debut novel, up there by herself) she did a great job. And she definitely came over as One Of Us (Book-nerd, Progressive, Queer-adjacent). And she’s currently reading Kari Sperring’s history book, The Welsh Kings, as research.

Someone asked Fiteni who her favourite writer was. Somewhat to my surprise, she said Shirley Jackson.

Liam Higginson was also at his first Hay with a debut novel. But because his book is adult horror and he’s a bloke he got a bigger tent, and Clare Fuller to interview him. I’ve not yet read The Hill in the Dark Grove, but I am now much more looking forward to it despite it being horror. The excerpt that Higginson read was very good, and he said all the right things about the book (including his answer to my question about its relationship to The Owl Service).

Higginson was like a kid in a sweet shop throughout, and he too came over as very nerdy. The book involves an ancient burial mound and he spent quite a bit of time talking about his love of Wales’s deep history, and Time Team. He also reads Lovecraft, and is aware of what an awful human being Howard was.

Higginson was also asked who his favourite writer was. Shirley Jackson again.

Samatha Shannon also managed to avoid the hostile interviewer trap, by doing a joint event with her best buddy, Saara El-Arifi. The two clearly know each other very well (and are beta readers for each other, if not alpha readers). They merrily swapped anecdotes about such things as loudly swapping euphemisms for genitals for use in sex scenes while writing together in a café. The event was sold out, as is only to be expected.

I had been hoping to hear more about El-Arifi’s new book about Cleopatra, but the audience was clearly there for Sapphic fantasy and that was what they were given. Shannon talked about how she realised that she was gay while writing The Priory of the Orange Tree, and El-Arifi said that her partner came out as non-binary after reading Faebound. It was a happy little queer cwtch all round.

My main take-away came from listening to Shannon talk about the origins of Priory in her getting angry with Richard Johnson about his (Elizabethan era) book, Famous Historie of the Seaven Champions of Christendom. Sadly it was relevant to a paper I was giving at Aberystwyth University the following day. It is indeed a terrible book, for all sorts of reasons.

I was also weirdly fascinated by the fact that El-Arifi writes in the bath. She has a plank of wood on which to rest her laptop, and periodically adds more hot water to keep warm. I hope she has the laptop running on battery.

Finally, in the evening, there was Gwenno, who was magnificent. It was just her and an electronic piano. No band. That lack was, I think, a bit felt on the more upbeat numbers such as ‘Eus Keus’ and ‘Dancing on Volcanoes’, but it did very much show off Gwenno’s superb voice. I’ve seen a review of Utopia that states that her voice “sounds like it might float past the Earth’s atmosphere if she let go of the string”, which I think is very apt.

It was a magnificent show, and I’m very glad I went, despite the fact that it meant I did not get to Aberystwyth until gone midnight.

My thanks to my pal Jo Lambert for the picnic. It was a very bookish day, very well spent.