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INTERNATIONAL FESTIVALS
ay Festival has attracted some colourful descriptions over the years. You know the ones I mean. Bill Clinton called it “the Woodstock of the mind”, Arthur Miller quipped, “Hay on Wye. Is that some kind of sandwich?”, and my personal favourite is from Tony Benn: “In my mind it’s replaced Christmas”. As a former local boy who meets old friends at Hay every year, I know exactly what he means; now we can’t always coincide at the turn of the year, but the festival is guaranteed to bring us together. It’s a fixture.
leading down to a statue of the rebel leader Juan Bravo, and on Sunday morning, poets and audience mingling on a guided walk through the Jardins de Romeral, beautiful landscaped gardens on the outskirts of this timeless cathedral city an hour north-west of Madrid. Beneath Segovia’s great architectural wonder, a Roman aqueduct rising almost a hundred feet into the bright blue sky, we sampled the local delicacy: suckling pig chopped maniacally with the side of a plate. It is the kind of pork-centred historic and histrionic ritual that could only happen here, at the heart of Old Spain.
The one thing we can’t rely on is the weather. Like bottle-green covers rolled across Wimbledon lawns or fluorescent, face-painted revellers knee-deep in Glastonbury mud, the appearance of that familiar hamlet of white marquees in the fields off the Brecon Road is a sign that summer just might be arriving. But for a long time now Hay Festival’s calendar has not been limited to 11 days across Whitsun half-term. Over the past decade and a half, the international Hay Festivals have circumnavigated the globe, magical realism made manifest, from Aarhus in Denmark to Arequipa in Peru, Kells in Ireland to Querétaro in Mexico; Segovia in Spain to Cartagena in Colombia.
In November, Hay Festival pitched up in Arequipa, Peru’s second city. Described as ‘a gun pointed at the heart of Lima’, this former capital, in the heart of the country’s southern Andean region, is evidence perhaps of the festival’s preference for staging events outside political centres. Hay line-ups are eclectic and diverse, but the unifying quality is free-thinking.
The key to the festival’s undoubted success in these locations is that in each place the familiar format of hour-long events in a variety of venues is given a local flavour, not only by the venues themselves – a university that was a monastery, a municipal theatre, a plush hotel in a former convent – but by the carefully curated roster of guests, the unique atmosphere and history of each town, and most importantly by the people who come to hear the speakers. In Segovia last September, highlights included gala poetry readings on Friday evening at dusk from a temporary stage in the old town, the audience seated amphitheatre-style on steps
Arequipa’s big cheese is Mario Vargas Llosa. One of the stars of the mid-twentieth century explosion of Latin American writers onto the world stage, Vargas Llosa is now in his eighties, and cuts an avuncular figure. A former presidential candidate as well as the country’s only Nobel laureate, an entourage of press, security and assorted associates follows the old man wherever he goes, creating a constant buzz around the tight grid of streets that comprise the centre of the city. Plaza de Armas, the big square at its centre, is dominated by the two towers of the milkywhite cathedral, a colonial edifice that is in turn dwarfed by Misti, a huge volcanic mountain that the Incas worshipped as a god, which silently looms over the city. It was on the slopes of nearby Ampato that the anthropologist Johan Reinhard discovered the mummified remains of a young Incan girl, the victim of a human
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