[5] From its inception, the festival was held at a variety of venues around Hay, including the local primary school, until 2005 when it moved to a unified location just south of the town.

[11][12] He commented: "I consider that my role had become untenable due to the conduct of the board and its insistence on holding a disciplinary hearing in my absence whilst I was off sick after a breakdown.

The winners each receive £20,000, divided into four quarterly grants, and have a research residency at the Eccles Centre, with curatorial support, and opportunities to promote their work at Hay Festival events in the UK and elsewhere.

Authors who signed the letter included such well-known figures as Stephen Fry, Noam Chomsky, Jung Chang and Bernardine Evaristo.

[18] In November 2020, Caitlin McNamara vowed to fight on following the CPS October 2020 decision not to prosecute the UAE minister because the alleged attack was said to have occurred outside its jurisdiction.

[21] In 2009, bookseller and proprietor of Oxford House Books, Paul Harris, who journalist Sean Dodson called a "Cromwell figure", held a mock trial of treason and symbolic "beheading" in effigy of Richard Booth as a protest at which criticism of the Festival was voiced.

Harris's prosecuting argument was that the Hay Festival had become too publicly dominant and had negatively impacted the economic fortunes of the many secondhand books shops that made up the town.

"[23] There were opponents to the "republican" mission, including the founder of the festival Peter Florence, who blamed the decreasing fortunes of the booksellers individually and said, they "need to rethink their (business) strategy".

"[24] In May 2024 the festival announced that it would suspend its sponsorship by Baillie Gifford in response to "claims raised by campaigners and intense pressure on artists to withdraw",[25] after speakers including A. K. Blakemore, Dawn Butler, Charlotte Church, Nish Kumar, Ania Magliano, Noreen Masud and Tori Tsui had announced that they would boycott the festival because of the sponsor's involvement with Israel and with fossil fuel.

[26][27] The opposition to Baillie Gifford was led by Fossil Free Books,[28] which had organised a letter signed by over 200 authors which called on them to disinvest from Israel.