Book Festivals

For years I've been meaning to go to the Guardian book festival at Hay-On-Wye. I still haven't been, and I discovered it about six years ago. It is simply the biggest and the best book festival here in the UK, a mecca for anyone interested even remotely in books and writing. The thing is, for the last six years I've had exams every summer and it has been impossible to justify taking time out from revision to attend lectures entirely irrelevant to my subject and miles away from my university. Highly frustrating; next year however, I have no exams. I sense a trip to Hay-on-Wye!

This is what the official site says: Hay-on-Wye is where the fun first started. Hay is a tiny market town in the Brecon Beacons National Park, It has 1500 people and 41 bookshops. The Festival is a spectacular holiday party for friends to gather and indulge their tastes for the finest books, food, drink, comedy, music, art, argument and literature.

How could anyone not? It sounds like paradise; all the books you could ever want and more besides, a massive variety of free lectures and talks (some you do have to pay for), and the company of fellow book lovers. They've expanded too, into Spain and Latin America. There's a festival in a few weeks in Colombia which features a range of Latin American and international writers and sounds wonderful. The authors listed have also given me some inspiration for more Latin American authors to look up, and I can't wait for the audio files to be made available online. What did we do before the internet?