Reading for Pleasure with Hay Festival

Join a surprise Hay Festival panel of writers and artists in a celebration of books that bring joy with recitals, conversation and new book recommendations – the ultimate book club night.

Everyone knows the benefits of reading: it expands your world, sharpens your mind. It might even make you more creative or successful. But fewer people are reading for pleasure in the UK. More and more people feel that books aren’t for them, or they don’t know where to begin.

So in 2026 – the UK’s National Year of Reading – Hay Festival has joined the Go All In campaign to celebrate the books that bring joy and offer new readers a way into a love of literature.

Throughout the year, the charity is compiling The Pleasure List – a selection of the very best books to inspire new readers – gathering recommendations from readers all over the country.

Get involved at https://www.hayfestival.org/the-pleasure-list

Speakers

Yassmin Abdel-Magied was born in Sudan, Y.M. Abdel-Magied’s first job as a teenager was in a coal mine in rural Australia. After graduating with first class honours in Mechanical Engineering, Abdel-Magied trained and worked as a MWD (Measurement While Drilling) contractor and drilling engineer across Europe, Australia, Asia and the US. AT SEA is Abdel-Magied’s first adult novel.

Tahmima Anam is the author of the Bengal trilogy and a recipient of the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Book and the O. Henry Award. Her short story ‘Garments’ was shortlisted for the BBC National Short Story Award. She is a Granta Best of Young British Novelist and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Born in Dhaka, Bangladesh, she trained as an anthropologist at Harvard University and now lives in London.

Chris Power is the author of the novel A Lonely Man (a Washington Post and New Statesman book of the year) and the short story collection Mothers (longlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize, shortlisted for the Edge Hill Short Story Prize). His fiction has appeared in Granta, The Stinging Fly, The Dublin Review, and The White Review, and been broadcast on BBC Radio 4. He writes for various newspapers and magazines and can sometimes be heard presenting Radio 4’s Open Book. He lives in London.

Stephanie Sy-Quia was born in 1995 and is based in London. Her writing and criticism have been published in The Guardian, The White Review, The Boston Review, Granta, The TLS, and others. She is a Ledbury Poetry Critic and has twice been shortlisted for the FT Bodley Head Essay Prize. Her debut Amnion, published by Granta Poetry in 2021, received a Somerset Maugham Award and was a Poetry Book Society Winter Recommendation; was longlisted for the Rathbones Folio and RSL Ondaatje Prizes; and won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. She is the recipient of an Eric Gregory Award. Her debut novel A Private Man will be published in 2026 by Picador in the UK, Grove Atlantic in the US and Suhrkamp in Germany.

Hosted by Tom Gatti, Literary editor at the Observer.