Hay Fever

The Kells literary festival is your intellectual catnip…

Last year saw the world famous Hay Festival decamp to the stunning Meath town of Kells for a satellite offshoot of the literary carnival and this year the event returns, marking it as the new must-do on the Irish writing calendar. At the launch of this year’s festival in Trinity’s beautiful Long Room last month we were promised a packed schedule with an amazing foodie focus and a quick glance through the programme shows that this year the festival is spreading it wings. While the festival began this week it runs until Sunday and there is so much to choose from?

Our picks include Sunday’s Food Blogger Forum with Forkful’s Aoife McElwain and Imen McDonnell?AKA Modern Farmette. Our favourite guilt-free cooking doyenne Susan Jane White will be bringing her Extra-Virgin Kitchen to Kells on Saturday – read our interview with the all-natural-sweeteners queen bee here. The biographer Jung Chang looks set to draw crowds that afternoon and on Sunday Bailey’s Prize nominee Audrey Magee will be talking about her heartbreaking war novel The Undertaking. Today sees novelist and television producer Anne Marie Casey in conversation with Irish actress and Beckett expert Lisa Dwan in conversation while the evening is sorted with Ham Sandwich’s gig in the Headfort Arms Hotel.

For more information see hayfestival.com/kells

Jeanne Sutton @jeannedesutun