Hay Festival 2016: guide to the loveliest literary events

The Brecon Beacons National Park is one of Britain’s wildest, most beautiful landscapes, a rugged expanse of mountains, moors, and castles. It’s also home to Hay-on-Wye, an almost impossibly picturesque and bookshop-steeped town that plays host to the Hay Festival, a celebration of ideas bringing together thinkers from across the globe.

The full Hay Festival 2016 program is yet to be announced, but here's our highlights from the impressive run of early bird events.

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Marlon James is not to be missed. He won last year’s Man Booker Prize with A Brief History of Seven Killings, a maximalist novel which took the assassination of Bob Marley as its starting point, before moving into a vividly imagined world, populated by drug barons and beauty queens.

We’re also particularly excited about the talk from Jeanette Winterson. From debut novel Oranges are Not the Only Fruit onwards, she’s established herself as a writer of unwavering talent, with a particular interest in how we form identities. Her most recent novel The Gap of Time is a modern reworking of Shakespeare’s entrancing romance The Winter’s Tale.

Svetlana Alexievich, the 2015 Nobel Literature Laureate, is a writer and investigative journalist with a sharp literary sensibility. Her interest is in human experience, and her subject life in the Soviet era and in the years that followed. Previous topics have ranged from the role Russian women played in the Second World War to the Chernobyl disaster so expect a wide-reaching discussion.

Christiana Figueres is Executive Secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. That means she’s the person in charge of the historic COP21 agreement, signed in Paris last year. A momentous step forward for global climate policy, it’s a responsibility like few others.

If you’re a self-confessed cinephile, don’t miss Tippi Hedren, a certified star of Hollywood’s golden age, best known for appearing in the Hitchcock classics, The Birds and Marnie. Comedy, meanwhile, comes courtesy of Dara Ó Briain, surely one of the quickest wits on British television.

If you’re a friend of Hay Festival, you can buy individual tickets for these early bird events, and more, now. If not, you can become a member or wait until general booking opens on January 30 at 9am.