Pessimism is probably “a bigger problem than climate change”, said the novelist Ian McEwan on Monday afternoon, as temperatures broke May records in the UK.

McEwan “constantly” hears people say that they don’t “expect their children to have as good a life as they did”, but suggested that optimism is a “moral duty”.

McEwan’s latest book, What We Can Know, is partly set in 2119, in a Britain submerged by seas. He spoke at the Hay festival on a panel alongside the former NFU president Minette Batters and Sandi Toksvig, on a day that saw temperatures in London reach 34.8C, beating a May record set in 1922.

McEwan went on to say that optimism is an “exercise in rationality”, because it’s “quite possible” – given that “the world is big, cultures are diverse” – that “there could be a revolution happening and we don’t even know about it”. He referred to the “historical moment” in 2020 when electricity generated from renewable sources outpaced that generated from gas and coal plants in the UK. “We were probably too busy with Covid to even notice,” he said.

He added that “self-interest might be a very good first step” towards progress on the climate crisis. “If you’ve knocked, say, £150 off your annual bill by having a few panels on your balcony – if you happen to have a balcony – the next step will feel slightly virtuous. It’s a nudge, basically.”

Batters, who led the government’s farming profitability review last year, said that farmers “do not know what is coming next” due to extreme weather. “Last year, in my 26 years of farming, I’ve never had a year like it,” she added. “We produced 50% of our normal hay crop, 50% of our normal silage crop.”

Uncertainty for farmers is heightened by “all the political shenanigans, the changes”, she said. Batters’s review highlighted that just 7% of farmers in England fully understand “Defra’s vision for farming”.

“Farmers don’t know what the national plan is, and the government doesn’t know what the individual plans are on the farm,” she continued. Farming has “almost become a game of Russian roulette”. Her decision to grow spring barley this year was akin to “rolling dice”.

Batters also criticised Andy Burnham’s proposal for a land value tax. “When I hear Andy Burnham talking about taxing land around Manchester, I’m just thinking: ‘Oh my goodness,’” she said. “Ten-year waiting lists on allotments, lack of green spaces: can’t we focus on proper land use?”

Asked about HS2, McEwan said that there would be a “huge gain in cutting our losses” and investing money in local services instead.

He also said that the “blessing” of 2,000 years of footpaths in Britain has been “extraordinary”, but that the footpaths are “under a pressure”, adding that “quite powerful, semi-corrupt large landowners can somehow get a footpath closed down by taking the leader of the council out to dinner”.

Gisèle Pelicot has described the moment she fell in love and was able to trust again after her rape ordeal orchestrated by her former husband in France.

Pelicot, 73, waived her right to anonymity during the trial of Dominique Pelicot, who was jailed for 20 years in 2024 for drugging and raping her and allowing other men to sexually assault her while she was unconscious, over almost a decade.

Speaking at the Hay festival in Wales on Saturday, she said she never thought she could trust a man again before meeting her partner, Jean-Loup Agopian.

The campaigner said: “It’s something that I didn’t think could happen, especially at my age, first of all, I didn’t really want to fall in love, but life decided otherwise.

“We met, our trajectories crossed at one moment and I met this young man of 73… You see, you can fall in love at any age, it happened to me, it can happen to you, I’m convinced of it.

“I didn’t think that I’d be able to trust a man, but it’s what happened to me, so you see that everything can be allowed in life, you must never despair.”

Pelicot appeared at the festival to discuss her memoir A Hymn to Life and was interviewed on stage by Lady Kennedy.

She said that “society has got to wake up” on the issue of violence against women, and that it’s an “appalling evil that touches all borders”.

“I thought that my story only related to me, but I realised that, in fact, it was really the tree that hid the forest,” she continued.

Yet, she feels “serene” about the future for women, because “I think that we can all live together in harmony, men and women, and I think it’s a question of educating our children very young”.

“Maybe I’m a very optimistic person by nature, but I would hope that the human being will go towards peace and love.”

Last month, French authorities launched an investigation into the reappearance of a website Dominique Pelicot used to recruit dozens of strangers to rape his wife in their home between 2011 and 2020. Authorities said the French-language platform Coco has been linked to crimes, including the sexual abuse of children, rape and murder. The website, which was registered abroad, was shut down in June 2024.

Pelicot described it as an “absolute miracle” to be speaking on stage, because “the way in which [Dominique] sedated me, he sedated me so strongly, I’m wondering how my heart and my body was able to hold for so long”.

When Pelicot was being unknowingly drugged, people around her wondered whether she was drunk or unwell. “My children and my friends were very worried for me, because very often when I was on the phone with them, I often repeated the same things, but I don’t remember that at all.”

Pelicot described taking years to decide to waive her right to anonymity. When her decision was announced in court in front of the 51 men who were ultimately declared guilty of rape and their lawyers, she realised they were going to “make me pay for it very dearly, and that’s what happened, they really tried to humiliate me”.

Pelicot’s daughter, Caroline Darian, is also pursuing legal action against Dominique Pelicot. Among the images in his possession were two photos of his daughter in which she is unconscious on a bed wearing underwear that is not her own. Pelicot said she believed there had been “an incestuous attitude towards his daughter that was intolerable”.

She said Darian “didn’t find justice” during Pelicot’s case, and that she hopes her daughter will win her own case, in order to “rebuild herself”.

Pelicot also praised Darian’s advocacy group M’endors pas, which campaigns against chemical submission. She invited her onstage, and said that she was “really proud” to be her mother.

Emma Thompson, Malala Yousafzai, Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe and Gisèle Pelicot are among the headline names appearing at Hay festival 2026, organisers have announced.

The popular UK literary festival has now unveiled its full programme, featuring more than 500 events running from 21 to 31 May in Hay-on-Wye, Powys.

A wide range of leading writers, including Ian McEwan, Maggie O’Farrell, Colm Tóibín, Ali Smith, Elizabeth Strout, Matt Haig, Douglas Stuart, Samantha Harvey, Val McDermid and Ocean Vuong, will appear. Margaret Busby, Cressida Cowell, Tayari Jones, Elizabeth Day, Frank Cottrell-Boyce, Helen Oyeyemi and Ruth Ozeki also feature in the literary schedule, alongside an array of other writers, speakers and thinkers.

Political figures set to speak at the festival include David Miliband, Nicola Sturgeon, Sajid Javid and Louise Casey, alongside historians Alice Roberts, David Olusoga and Simon Schama.

Themed panels will include a discussion on gender equality, hosted by former leader of the Scottish Conservatives Ruth Davidson, former Australian prime minister Julia Gillard, Labour peer Harriet Harman, and Sky News political editor Beth Rigby.

There will be a host of genre-themed events, including a romantasy panel. Elsewhere, Facebook whistleblower and author of Careless People, Sarah Wynn-Willliams, will be in conversation on the power of tech companies, alongside investigative journalist Carole Cadwalladr, the reporter who exposed the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

Musicians including Gwenno and Aled Jones will take to the stage throughout the festival. And the comedy lineup features Dawn French, Michael McIntyre, Sara Pascoe, Sandi Toksvig and Greg Davies, among others.

There will also be conversations on the art of adaptation, as director Emerald Fennell talks about Wuthering Heights, while Maggie O’Farrell and producer Liza Marshall go behind the scenes on Hamnet. Young readers will be able to attend events with children’s authors including Michael Morpurgo and Frank Cottrell-Boyce.

A new series of My Life in Books events will see public figures talking about their favourite reads in conversation with leading writers and broadcasters. Headline sessions include actor Emma Thompson in discussion with writer and podcaster Elizabeth Day, and appearances from Prue Leith, Hugh Bonneville and adventurer Bear Grylls in conversation with podcaster Jamie Laing.

To spotlight the UK’s National Year of Reading, YouTuber Jack Edwards will discuss the campaign with National Literacy Trust director Jonathan Douglas, along with authors Joseph Coelho and Katherine Rundell.

“As the UK Government’s National Year of Reading invites the country to Go All In for books, our tents are open to all, spaces where everyone is welcome to exchange ideas and inspiration,” said Hay festival CEO Julie Finch.

To mark the 250th anniversary of the US Declaration of Independence, there will be a series of events called America 250 which will explore the changing identity of the nation, featuring authors Sarah Churchwell, David Olusoga, Sarah Pearsall and Simon Schama. General Tim Radford, Katrin Bennhold and geopolitics writer Tim Marshall will discuss the Trump era, in conversation with Helen Lewis.

In conjunction with the National Year of Reading, the festival’s Pleasure List campaign will crowdsource public recommendations, with writers from across the programme sharing their favourite titles.

O’Farrell said she was “so pleased that I’ll be at Hay festival this year” – the Hamnet author will discuss her forthcoming novel, Land. She added: “I spent some of my childhood in Wales, so I’m always happy to go back. Land is a novel very much concerned with landscape, so it seems fitting to discuss it in the beautiful surroundings of Powys.”

Other writers set to appear at the festival include Hisham Matar, Kiran Desai, Kamila Shamsie, Elif Shafak, Sarah Moss, Sarah Hall, John Lanchester, Kiran Millwood Hargrave, Jenni Fagan, Irvine Welsh, Natalie Haynes, and Ben Okri.

Hay festival was founded in 1988 and has since grown into one of the world’s leading literary festivals. It also runs international editions, including events in Peru, Colombia, Mexico, Chile, Panama, Spain and the US.

Tickets are on sale now to Hay festival members, patrons and benefactors at hayfestival.org. Priority booking starts at noon on Wednesday 11 March, before general booking opens on Saturday 14 March.

There is “no way” that Gisèle Pelicot would have been raped more than 200 times without the existence of pornography websites, her daughter has said.

Speaking at the Hay festival in Powys on Thursday, Caroline Darian said there were “so many social problems like online porn” that can lead to instances of abuse.

Pelicot survived nearly a decade of rapes by dozens of men, including her then husband Dominique Pelicot, Darian’s father, who drugged his wife and facilitated the abuse. Pelicot rose to international fame last year for waiving her right to anonymity in the trial of her ex-husband and other defendants. He was sentenced to 20 years in prison.

Darian was at the festival to promote her book, I’ll Never Call Him Dad Again. Asked by a male audience member how men can “step up” and be part of breaking cycles of abuse, she said “you need to talk between guys” about pornography, because it is “part of the system” of misogyny and violence.

The actor and activist Jameela Jamil, who was chairing the event, said that “there are so many men in my life, even, who don’t know all of the facts of this case in the way that women do”.

What we “desperately need” men to do “is to check your mates” and challenge their misogynistic comments and behaviour, she said.

Darian is a pen name, a combination of her brothers Florian and David’s names, because she wanted to honour the fact that they have been so involved in the process of telling her story.

The author spoke with great compassion and admiration about her mother, but explained that they were not currently on speaking terms. In her book, she wrote that they reached a “point of no return” in their relationship after her mother did not believe Darian when she claimed her father had raped her.

Darian told the Hay audience that she thinks her mother’s reluctance to support her was a “way for her to protect herself”.

It’s “quite difficult” to accept that your child has been abused, she said. “I think my mum is not able to recognise it because otherwise I think she’s going to die.”

Dominique Pelicot’s actions have “really impacted the whole family, and everyone from her family had a different position”, she added. “But I just have to be grateful for what [Gisèle Pelicot] did.”

Telling her son, who was six at the time, about her father’s actions was particularly hard, Darian said. She felt a responsibility to tell him the truth but “it was a shock” as he had previously had a good relationship with his grandfather and “loved him very much”.

Her son saw a psychiatrist for almost four years after finding out the news, and Darian said she was “trying to educate him about what is consent”.

Raising a young man in a positive way was “a question of open dialogue”, she said, and “a question of education”.

There is “no way” that Gisèle Pelicot would have been raped more than 200 times without the existence of pornography websites, her daughter has said.

Speaking at the Hay festival in Powys on Thursday, Caroline Darian said there were “so many social problems like online porn” that can lead to instances of abuse.

Pelicot survived nearly a decade of rapes by dozens of men, including her then husband Dominique Pelicot, Darian’s father, who drugged his wife and facilitated the abuse. Pelicot rose to international fame last year for waiving her right to anonymity in the trial of her ex-husband and other defendants. He was sentenced to 20 years in prison.

Darian was at the festival to promote her book, I’ll Never Call Him Dad Again. Asked by a male audience member how men can “step up” and be part of breaking cycles of abuse, she said “you need to talk between guys” about pornography, because it is “part of the system” of misogyny and violence.

The actor and activist Jameela Jamil, who was chairing the event, said that “there are so many men in my life, even, who don’t know all of the facts of this case in the way that women do”.

What we “desperately need” men to do “is to check your mates” and challenge their misogynistic comments and behaviour, she said.

Darian is a pen name, a combination of her brothers Florian and David’s names, because she wanted to honour the fact that they have been so involved in the process of telling her story.

The author spoke with great compassion and admiration about her mother, but explained that they were not currently on speaking terms. In her book, she wrote that they reached a “point of no return” in their relationship after her mother did not believe Darian when she claimed her father had raped her.

Darian told the Hay audience that she thinks her mother’s reluctance to support her was a “way for her to protect herself”.

It’s “quite difficult” to accept that your child has been abused, she said. “I think my mum is not able to recognise it because otherwise I think she’s going to die.”

Dominique Pelicot’s actions have “really impacted the whole family, and everyone from her family had a different position”, she added. “But I just have to be grateful for what [Gisèle Pelicot] did.”

Telling her son, who was six at the time, about her father’s actions was particularly hard, Darian said. She felt a responsibility to tell him the truth but “it was a shock” as he had previously had a good relationship with his grandfather and “loved him very much”.

Her son saw a psychiatrist for almost four years after finding out the news, and Darian said she was “trying to educate him about what is consent”.

Raising a young man in a positive way was “a question of open dialogue”, she said, and “a question of education”.

“I miss my solitude,” last year’s Booker prize winner Paul Lynch told an audience at Hay festival on Saturday.

“In many ways I didn’t sign up for this. I’m an introvert who’s learned how to be social, a social introvert,” he said. “I signed up to sit in a room on my own for three or four years and write a book,” he said.

“Something enormous comes your way, and you have to go with it. And I’ve gone with it, and I’ve done 200 interviews. It’s hard to process that, and I do worry, who will I be after this? When I come back to reality, when my feet touch the ground, what kind of writer am I going to be?

Lynch won the 2023 Booker prize for Prophet Song, set in an imagined Ireland that is descending into tyranny, praised for capturing “the social and political anxieties of our current moment”.

The day after winning, he did 23 interviews, with two 10-minute breaks. “I’m a meditator, and I said, ‘I need to meditate, so let me go into a room,’ and I meditate for 10 minutes and they literally grabbed me by the collar and yanked me back out.” The Booker prize staff told him he had appeared in 3,000 pieces of media around the world that day.

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After the media “tornado” is over, he ultimately believes he will be the “same writer”, because his “authentic self” takes over when he is writing. “When I seize upon an idea, all I’m interested in is getting to the end line of truth, and I hope that’s where I go next,” he said.

Lynch’s win in November came days after the Dublin riots. At the time, he thought “this isn’t the book coming true”. But “at the same time, it is the start of a certain energy that I’ve been thinking a lot about”.

It is a “very dangerous thing to presume” that liberal democracy is going to remain. “Civilisation is such a thin veneer, and it’s so fragile.”

He said that while Prophet Song “can be read as a very political novel”, he is not a political novelist. “That is something that has arrived almost by accident. What I’m seeking is human truth.”

Lynch also said that he has been re-reading Herzog by Saul Bellow, a writer “who has been banished. The problem with banished writers, the great dead white males, is that great writing still sits there, and it calls you back”.

Former Conservative MP Rory Stewart found being a politician “very yucky” and felt like a fraud, he told an audience at Hay festival on Saturday.

Asked whether he would consider going back into politics, he said that he found being a politician “personally very, very unpleasant” and “didn’t like it”, adding: “I feel like a fraud all the time, in a whole series of ways.”

He said that maintaining the image of working in three places at once – his Penrith and the Border constituency, parliament and abroad as part of ministerial duties – as an MP was one such example.

He was expected to be in his constituency “full-time, focusing on the things that really matter” to constituents.

“I’m also a legislator in parliament, and everybody’s expecting me to be 350 miles away from Cumbria in Westminster scrutinising legislation and voting on legislation.

“I’m also the minister for Africa, and everybody’s expecting me to be in South Sudan worrying about the delivery of aid and how we deal with the civil war.”

Stewart, 51, who was minister for Africa for six months between June 2017 and January 2018, said that he could not “do it all” and be in three places at once.

Yet “on social media, I’m pretending I’m in all three at the same time. I’m sending out tweets, ‘Here I am in South Sudan with a war lord’, ‘Here I am in Cumbria with a farmer’, ‘Here I am in Westminster scrutinising legislation’, right? And at no time am I actually with my family or going to Pret or doing any of the things that I might want to do.”

He said that he also feels like a “total fraud” dealing with the public, including at Saturday’s festival.

“I hate this,” he said, because he thinks he is on a “tightrope” all the time. “I can chit-chat, I can dance around, I can sell you ideas, I can maybe even make you vote for me, but I’m aware that the situation is fundamentally unstable, that at some point, one, or 10, or 20 or a 100 of you are going to wake up and be like, ‘Who is this prick? Why am I listening to him? He’s a fraud, he’s a hypocrite.’”

Stewart also said that he had, for the first time in his life, “thought briefly” about suicide after telling a reporter that some areas of his constituency were “pretty primitive, people holding up their trousers with bits of twine”.

Looking back, he felt he had a “very excessive reaction” because most of his constituents “didn’t really care and thought it was quite funny”.

The historian David Olusoga has said the UK is the one country left in the British empire as he likened it to being the last oblivious person at a party.

Asked at Hay festival on Sunday whether the British empire had ended, the broadcaster said: “There’s one country left in the British empire that needs to liberate itself and have its independence day from its own history, and that’s Britain.”

He added: “It’s like we’ve had a party and everyone else left and we haven’t noticed. It infects our view of ourselves; it complicates and confuses our view of the rest of the world; it stops us from fully understanding how the rest of the world relates to us.”

Olusoga said the attitude “infects” Britain’s institutions and was one of the reasons why there were debates over the honours system. “It’s just silly to have national honours named after an empire that doesn’t exist. It’s like having it named after Narnia,” he said.

Asked if he had an OBE, Olusoga said: “I have, yeah, and it’s utterly silly.”

Britain had not dealt with or been “open and honest” about its history, which led to such “ridiculous contradictions”, he said.

At the same event, Sathnam Sanghera, the author of Empireland and Empireworld, said that for him the British empire “did end with Hong Kong [in] 1997”.

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He highlighted that Tony Blair talked about handing back Hong Kong to China in his memoirs but was only dimly aware of the history. “You can bet that every Chinese person there was very aware of the opium wars,” said Sanghera. “It’s typical that our prime minister arrived in Hong Kong to give back a colony and didn’t know about the history. Isn’t that deeply shameful? And it continues.”

Britain had never had a “dark night of the soul”, said Sanghera, “where we’ve had to reflect about what we did”.

Olusoga noted that Britain did not have an empire museum, and Sanghera said the Victoria and Albert Museum would be a “brilliant basis” for such a museum because of its historical links to the East India Company.

In 1879, about 19,000 objects given to, bought or looted by the East India Company for the India Museum in London were transferred to the South Kensington Museum, the predecessor of the V&A.

Sanghera said the online abuse targeted at the writers was “not fair. We’re just writing history books.”

Olusoga added that “shoot the messenger” attitudes had emerged because it was easier to accuse historians of “hating Britain” than to examine the history. “I’m accused of hating white people, which is bad news for my mother and my wife,” he said.

Sanghera said one of the “common motifs” in the rightwing press was that American racism was worse than British racism, which was considered “twee and cute”, despite the fact that Britain “played a huge role in the development of racism”.

Former Australian prime minister Julia Gillard has said global progress on gender equality is “really glacial and slow” as she warned that it is going backwards among young people.

Gillard cited recent polling by King’s College London’s Global Institute for Women’s Leadership, which showed that 51% of respondents believe that men are doing too much to support gender equality, while 46% think that men are now discriminated against.

What is “stunning and unexpected”, she told the Hay festival, are the differences according to age, with 60% of men aged 16-27 thinking “women’s equality has gone too far”, more than any other age group.

Gen Z is also more than twice as likely as boomers to agree with the statement that “a man who stays home with his children is less of a man”.

“We have got to get to grips with this, and we have to ask ourselves as feminists a fairly difficult and deep question about whether we have in our rhetoric and campaigning for gender equality been as careful as we should be to explain that actually gender equality will be better for everyone,” she said.

“This isn’t about women getting unfair advantages, it’s about creating a world where nobody is hemmed in by gender stereotypes, and that’s better for men and for women.”

More needs to be done to dispel the idea of a zero-sum game in which women take men’s jobs, noting that female quotas in Australian politics had proven successful, and that these initiatives are often “sensitive in transition but end point is one that people embrace”, she said.

As chair of Kings College London’s Global Institute for Women’s Leadership, she said she would like to feel that there was no longer a need for the organisation, but the “research base is thin” and there was desperate need to “see problems clearly”. “I’m very passionate that we accelerate the pace of change, and good research is critical to that,” she said.

Noting that the World Economic Forum estimates that gender equality around the world is still 130 years away, she said that, in 1998, a person would have more chance of being CEO of a FTSE company if they were named Dave or David than if they were a woman. That has improved marginally since, though Daves and Davids combined with Steve, Stevens and Stephens still outnumber women in the top corporate jobs.

Unconscious biases need to be challenged as research suggests people tend to think that “confident, charismatic men” make the best leaders, when in fact they typically perform worse than more collaborative and cautious women and men, she said.

Kings College London research suggests that the gender split on political views is the biggest it has ever been, with young men more likely to lean right on gender and inclusion issues, whereas women are more progressive.

“That spells trouble for the future of politics,” she said. “We really have to understand what’s happening around attitude formation in young men.”

While she said the drivers remain unknown, she suggested that it may be connected to early exposure to violent porn and “toxic influences online selling a version of masculinity that your manhood is best expressed by subjugating women”.

Although she had wanted to “get on with it” starting her job as Australia’s first female prime minister, she couldn’t ignore the growing characterisation of her building on social media as a “hateful, ambitious, clawing woman who didn’t understand what empathy was, what nurturing was, what kind of woman chooses not to have children”, and was moved to address misogyny head on in parliament.

While research suggests that the traditional media is treating gender in politics better than it used to, she said “the seamy underside of social media has got so much worse”, with abuse primarily targeted at women and in particular women of colour.

“Why do we allow this to happen?” she asked, saying she “can’t believe” it has not yet been possible to design better social media regulation.

While she said she “wasn’t a shrinking violet when it comes to parliamentary debate”, she warned that “we have pushed the pendulum so far now across democracies … to hyper-partisanship fed by the thinness of social media, everything’s a binary, you’re for or against it”.

She advocated “deliberate remedies and measures to put in place political and democratic systems that take us away from that” such as involving citizens more in shaping decisions and other forms of direct democracy.

She suggested reconfiguring parliaments to allocate members’ seats randomly, so they are not sat in adversarial opposition, but would be encouraged to form bonds with each other.

She also recommended the Australian model of compulsory voting, as well as the preferential voting system, meaning if you vote for a minor party as your first choice and it is eliminated, your second vote still counts.

Asked about whether female leaders would improve progress in mitigating climate breakdown, she said the fact that people now for the first time believe their children’s lives will be worse makes this challenging.

“It’s very hard to get people to come on big change journeys and show the social solidarity needed to do that if they no longer have faith that we can build a better future together.”

The Hay literary festival has dropped its principal sponsor after boycotts from speakers and performers over the firm’s links to Israel and fossil fuel companies.

The singer Charlotte Church and the comedian Nish Kumar were among the latest to pull out over the investment management firm Baillie Gifford’s sponsorship of the festival.

On Friday afternoon the festival said it was ending its sponsorship deal with the company.

The Hay chief executive, Julie Finch, said the decision had been taken “in light of claims raised by campaigners and intense pressure on artists to withdraw”.

“Our first priority is to our audience and our artists,” she added. “Above all else, we must preserve the freedom of our stages and spaces for open debate and discussion, where audiences can hear a range of perspectives.”

Though Baillie Gifford’s sponsorship has been “suspended” for 2024, the festival plans, as it does each year, to review all of its sponsorships before next year’s event. Festival organisers also plan to meet with Fossil Free Books (FFB), the group that has been leading the campaign against Baillie Gifford, after this year’s festival.

Baillie Gifford began sponsoring the Hay festival in 2016 and was its principal sponsor. A Baillie Gifford spokesperson said: “It is regrettable our sponsorship with the festival cannot continue.”

Church pulled out of her scheduled appearance on Thursday night, issuing a statement via her social media channels to say that she had decided to boycott the festival “in solidarity with the people in Palestine and in protest of the artwashing and greenwashing that is apparent in this sponsorship”.

Kumar, the Labour peer Shami Chakrabarti and Dawn Butler MP were also among those scheduled to appear who chose to drop out over the issue.

Announcing his withdrawal on X, Kumar shared a latest statement from FFB that has now been signed by more than 700 writers and publishing industry professionals. The statement reiterated the group’s previous demands that the company cease its investments in the fossil fuel industry, and also demanded that Baillie Gifford divest “from companies that profit from Israeli apartheid, occupation and genocide”, as it believes that “solidarity with Palestine and climate justice are inextricably linked”.

Some signatories of FFB’s statement decided to still attend Hay, including George Monbiot. Before he began his event discussing neoliberalism on Thursday night, the Guardian columnist and campaigner said he had decided not to boycott the festival, partly because he believed the Hay festival to be “a good cause”.

“We can’t just point to one instance of this Earth-eating, people-eating system and say that, and that alone is the problem,” he added.

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Responding to FFB’s statement last week, Baillie Gifford reiterated that just 2% of its clients’ money was invested in “companies with some business related to fossil fuels”, compared with the market average of 11%.

A spokesperson from the asset manager also told the Guardian that divesting in the way FFB had asked was not possible, because of regulations all UK asset managers must follow. “When it comes to subjective ethical situations relating to particular sectors (such as fossil fuels) or countries (such as Israel), our clients set the parameters and determine what to exclude or divest,” they said.

Baillie Gifford remains the sponsor of a number of literary festivals, including the Edinburgh international book festival and Cheltenham literature festival, as well as the Baillie Gifford prize for nonfiction.

Edinburgh has put out a statement responding to FFB’s statement and festival boycotts, saying it wants to “work together with Fossil Free Books, and other groups, as we move towards a more sustainable future”, while organisers “continue to speak to Baillie Gifford, and our other sponsors, about these complex issues”.