The story
Hay Festival in Hay-on-Wye
Held in the Welsh border town already famous for its secondhand bookshops, the Hay Festival has run author talks and public interviews with novelists, historians, scientists, and political figures since 1988, growing into an internationally exported literary festival that Bill Clinton once called the Woodstock of the mind.
Bill Clinton, visiting in 2001, called the Hay Festival the Woodstock of the mind, and the description stuck largely because it captures something real: a literary festival that turns a small Welsh border town already famous for its secondhand bookshops into a temporary open-air venue for the kind of conversation more often confined to lecture halls or television studios.