From kitchen table to digital anytime: Hay Festival and the creation of a British Literary institution

Addis, Ellen (2025). From kitchen table to digital anytime: Hay Festival and the creation of a British Literary institution. University of Birmingham. Ph.D.

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Abstract

This thesis is a close study of Hay Festival and its influence on contemporary literary culture within its thirty-seven year history from 1987 to 2024. More specifically, the thesis explores its expansion from a small family-run arts festival with a single, definable annual festival in Wales into a wide-ranging international charity and arts organisation with multiple festivals and projects running year-round. As the festival markets itself without the definite article, this thesis will use the term ‘Hay Festival’ throughout the thesis. The accession of Hay Festival’s materials to the British Library in 2017 has been highly influential on the outcome of this thesis and is a strong indication of the festival’s national institutionalisation. The thesis argues that despite a recent marginalisation of literature at Hay Festival – with literature becoming one type of event among many – the festival is a powerful producer of stories that, as an institution, articulates its history and its place within the changing local and digital environments of contemporary literary culture.

The purpose of this thesis is to examine the central role that Hay Festival has played in particular to changes in authorship, audience, funding, and the growing commercialisation of arts organisations in the past four decades. Part one, ‘Histories,’ provides an archivally- informed history and analysis of how Hay Festival and its myriad projects and festivals developed to be one of the most successful cultural organisations of its kind. Part two, ‘Places,’ studies the impact of Hay Festival’s local and digital environments, examining the influence of the Welsh-English border landscape surrounding it, and the role of digital technology in its story. Overall, this thesis argues that Hay Festival has made a rich contribution to both the story of arts organisations in modern Britain and to the resilience of literary festivals as an international phenomenon in a post-pandemic digital era.

Type of Work:

Thesis (Doctorates > Ph.D.)

Award Type:

Doctorates > Ph.D.

Supervisor(s):