The Hay Festival of Literature & Arts is an annual literature festival held in Hay-on-Wye, Powys, Wales for ten days from May to June. Devised by Norman and Peter Florence in 1988, the festival was described by Bill Clinton in 2001 as "The Woodstock of the mind". Since its inception, the festival was held at a variety of venues around Hay, including the local Primary School, until 2005 when it moved to a central location just outside of the town.The Guardian has been the main sponsor of the festival since 2002, succeeding The Sunday Times. The Daily Telegraph and its associated brands in Telegraph Media Group were announced as the new sponsor for three years starting with the 2011 festival.

The festival has expanded in recent years and now includes musical performances and film previews. A children's festival, "Hay Fever", runs alongside the main festival. It has also expanded internationally and sister festivals take place in Nairobi, Zacatecas, The Maldives, Kerala, Beirut, Belfast, Cartagena, the Alhambra Palace, Parc Prison in Bridgend and Segovia. In 2009 Hay Festival also took on the ailing Brecon Jazz Festival.

Stephen John Fry (born 24 August 1957) is an English actor, screenwriter, author, playwright, journalist, poet, comedian, television presenter, film director, and a director of Norwich City Football Club.

After a troubled childhood and adolescence, during which he was expelled from a number of schools and eventually spent three months in prison for credit card fraud, he was able to secure a place at Queens' College, Cambridge, where he studied English Literature.

He first came to public attention in the 1981 Cambridge Footlights Revue presentation "The Cellar Tapes", which also included Hugh Laurie, Emma Thompson and Tony Slattery. With Hugh Laurie, as the comedy double act Fry and Laurie, he co-wrote and co-starred in A Bit of Fry & Laurie, and took the role of Jeeves (with Laurie playing Wooster) in Jeeves and Wooster.

As an actor, Fry played the lead in the film Wilde, was Melchett in the BBC television series Blackadder, starred as the title character Peter Kingdom in the ITV series Kingdom, has a recurring guest role as Dr. Gordon Wyatt on the Fox crime series Bones and appeared as rogue TV host Gordon Deitrich in the dystopian thriller V For Vendetta. He has also written and presented several documentary series including the 2008 television series Stephen Fry in America, which saw him travelling across all 50 US states. Since 2003 he has been the host of the quiz show QI.

Christopher Eric Hitchens (13 April 1949 – 15 December 2011) was an English American author and journalist whose career spanned more than four decades. Hitchens, often referred to colloquially as "Hitch", was a columnist and literary critic for New Statesman, The Atlantic, The Nation, The Daily Mirror, The Times Literary Supplement and Vanity Fair. He was an author of twelve books and five collections of essays. As a staple of talk shows and lecture circuits, he was a prominent public intellectual, and his confrontational style of debate made him both a lauded and controversial figure.

Hitchens was known for his admiration of George Orwell, Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson, as well as for his excoriating critiques of various public figures including Mother Teresa, Bill Clinton, Henry Kissinger and Diana, Princess of Wales. Although he supported the Falklands War, his key split from the established political left began in 1989 after what he called the "tepid reaction" of the Western left to the Rushdie Affair. The September 11 attacks strengthened his internationalist embrace of an interventionist foreign policy, and his vociferous criticism of what he called "fascism with an Islamic face." His numerous editorials in support of the Iraq War caused some to label him a neoconservative, although Hitchens insisted he was not "a conservative of any kind", and his friend Ian McEwan describes him as representing the anti-totalitarian left.

Daniel Samper Pizano (born 8 June 1945) is a Colombian lawyer, journalist, and prolific writer.

Samper attended the Gimnasio Moderno, where he began writing in the students newspaper El Aguilucho. At the age of 19 he worked for the Colombian newspaper El Tiempo as a reporter. After graduating from high school, Samper studied law in the Pontifical Xavierian University and later attended graduate school for journalism at Kansas University, United States. He was also awarded the Nieman Fellowship by Harvard University. Since then he has been an editor, columnist and author of some 25 books, TV and movie screenwriter and winner of numerous recognitions and awards in Colombia and abroad; Among these, the Maria Moors Cabot prize given by Columbia University, the "Rey de España" prize and has won three times the Colombian "Simón Bolívar Prize for Journalism". His writings are notable for having a wide and soft sense of humor mixed with some social criticism. He writes a column for El Tiempo called "Cambalache" (colloquialism meaning "Exchange") and the magazine Carrusel with a humor section called "Postre de notas", as well as some articles written for Colombian magazines such as El Malpensante, Revista Semana and Gatopardo. In Colombia, Samper is also considered the father of Colombian investigative journalism after his work as a reporter for El Tiempo newspaper.

Ricardo Piglia (born on November 24, 1941 in Adrogué and raised in Mar del Plata) is one of the foremost contemporary Argentine writers, known for his fiction, including several collections of short stories; the novels Artificial Respiration (1980), The Absent City (1992), Burnt Money (1997); and criticism including Criticism and Fiction (1986), Brief Forms (1999) and The Last Reader (2005).

Piglia has received a number of awards, including the Premio internacional de novela Rómulo Gallegos (2011),Premio Iberoamericano de las Letras (2005), Premio Planeta (1997), Premio Casa de las Américas (1967).

He has been a long time resident of the United States, where he teaches Latin American literature at Princeton University.

Essays

Novels

Short story collections