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The Hay Festival and the BBC have linked up for a three-year global partnership which will see “unprecedented” coverage of the festival on the BBC.
The collaboration starts this year, with coverage of the festival taking place across the BBC’s networks, including globally with BBC World News.
Among the output from the festival will be broadcasts on BBC radio stations, including Radio 4, 6 Music and Radio Cymru, and a one hour BBC Four documentary about the festival and the town of Hay-on-Wye.
The BBC will broadcast exclusive interviews with Toni Morrison, Jung Change and Karl Ove Knausgaard as part of the Talking Books series, which will have five special episodes dedicated to the festival and which will be presented by Razia Iqbal.
BBC Arts Online will publish daily content, including live streams of some headline events and daily festival digests, “helping to further realise the BBC and Hay Festival’s ambitions for a digital festival”.
Tony Hall, director general of the BBC, said: “This is the strongest commitment to Hay Festival we’ve made. Our coverage this year will demonstrate our ambition to join up arts on the BBC like never before – across television, radio and digital. By doing so we can give the public access to the greatest writers, performers and thinkers in a way that no one else can.
“The BBC will be broadcasting a broad range of programmes from the Hay festival, including the One Show, Radio 3’s In Tune and World News’ Talking Books Specials, in addition to reflecting the true spirit of the festival and its unique cultural line-up to those who cannot attend – this to me is a model of public service broadcasting.”
The BBC Tent at the festival will include appearances and performances from writers including Sebastian Faulks and Gillian Clarke.
Peter Florence, director of Hay Festival, said: “This partnership takes conversations that take place in a field in Wales, on a beach in Cartagena, in a garden in Bangladesh and amplifies them to readers and thinkers in every country on earth. It’s an extraordinary opportunity to be both local and global, intimate and public, to share stories and ideas beyond borders or silences. The BBC will give everyone, everywhere, the best seat at the table.”
The BBC announced some of its plans for Hay, including the first live broadcast of “The One Show” from the festival, earlier this year.