Deckchairs, umbrellas, bookshops at every corner, people stuffed into marquees apologising profusely as they bump the elbows of their tweed jackets into one other. The Hay festival is a special literary event.
The prizes awarded to the authors honoured by a new competition for prison writing would not cover the cost of the invitation card for other Hay bashes. The winner gets a £20 phone card, the runners up £5 cards. Clive Hopwood, of the Writers in Prison organisation, joint organisers of the competition, said: "In the best tradition of the Oscars, most of our winners can't be with us today."
How Goldfinger nearly became Goldprick
The story of the Erno Goldfinger's vehement reaction when the author Ian Fleming appropriated his name - and aspects of his character - with deliberate savagery for the villain and title of the James Bond novel was disclosed to the Guardian Hay festival yesterday.
Tiny fans besiege book world's bejewelled star
Roll over Jane Fonda and Goldie Hawn, Jacqueline Wilson, the newly-elected children's laureate, was the one true diva at Hay this year.
Tiffany Murray is a longtime friend of the Hay festival, but this year, as well as helping out, she read from her debut novel, Happy Accidents, at an event with Audrey Niffenegger and Diana Evans. From gout and pigs to clashes with Goldie Hawn, she kept a diary of her time in Hay.
The trouble with fictional Troubles
Festival author Linda Anderson challenges writers to abandon Northern Irish cliches of thuggish gunmen and harridans banging binlids, and get to grips with the new political situation in the province.
Apocalypse sooner or later?
Robert McNamara knows all about the threat of nuclear annihilation - he was US defence secretary during the Cuban missile crisis. Forty-three years later, he believes the danger from nuclear weapons is still very real. He talks to Julian Borger
Academic leaves Hay lost for words with book on dyslexia
Like many other speakers at Hay, Vicki Goodwin read her audience a short, world-famous passage of literature: "The nwhile er at pusieb hi msel ffet ching qla te sanpk nive sanbfor ksanp mu stapr which chhem lxeb i nanegg. Cudt he m molehi sposoms till he aving wit."
