You are viewing your 1 free article this month. Login to read more articles.
Julia Donaldson, Axel Scheffler, Eric Vuillard and Carole Cadwalladr have been announced as the recipients of this year’s Hay Festival medals.
The locally-crafted awards have been given out each year at the Hay-on-Wye event since 2012, inspired by the original Olympic medal for poetry.
Donaldson will receive her award for poetry, Scheffler for illustration, Vuillard for fiction and the Guardian’s Cadwalladr gets a medal for journalism.
Peter Florence, director of Hay Festival, said: “The poetry medal winner is Julia Donaldson, who brings parents and children together with books all over the world. The illustration medal goes to her collaborator and Gruffalo co-creator, the peerless German artist, Axel Scheffler, who brings his Drawing Europe Together exhibition to the festival.
“The fiction medal is awarded for The Order of the Day (Picador), a terrifying black comedy by the Goncourt prize-winning French novelist Eric Vuillard. The medal for journalism is awarded for the heroic and rigorous investigative journalism of Carole Cadwalladr.”
The awards will be handed out live on stage during the 11-day event from 23rd May to 2nd June. Last year saw medals awarded to Margaret Atwood, Evelyn Schlag and Jackie Morris.
Confirmed speakers and performers for the 2019 festival include Arundhati Roy, Ian McEwan, Jeanette Winterson, Steven Pinker, Caroline Criado Perez, Stephen Fry and Sandi Toksvig.