The British Council, global partner of the Hay Festival, collaborated for the fifth consecutive year with Hay Festival Segovia in a series of cultural activities which included visual arts, music, the promotion of reading and teaching English through contemporary British literature.

Hay Festivals and the British Council jointly launched a global partnership at the Hay-on-Wye Festival this May. Working together to bring the UK’s best authors and thinkers to an international audience, the global partnership will see festivals taking place in Beirut, Belfast, Wales, Zacatecas, Segovia, Nairobi, Maldives, Kerala and Cartagena, throughout the year. For more information on the partnership, click here.

The British Council’s programme in Segovia included various talks by the writers Melvin Burgess and Beverley Naidoo aimed at students and teachers of English. In addition, Scott Thornbury, renowned expert in teaching English as a foreign language presented a webinar live from Japan.

The photography exhibition Classroom Portraits by Julian Germain presented a selection of portraits taken by the artist in classrooms at various schools in Madrid and around the world.

In the area of music, the bands of the British Council School, Madrid and Morpeth College, Tower Hamlets, London treated us to a programme of traditional and latin rhythms, swing, jazz and contemporary rock.

The theme of global warming was also tackled through the screening of a lecture by Nick Stern, author of the Stern Review: the Economics of Climate Change

The full Hay Festival Segovia programme included well-known authors like Paul Preston (biographer of Franco and King Juan Carlos) and Chris Stewart (Driving Over Lemons), as well as renowned Spanish authors like Antonio Muñoz Molina, María Dueñas, Ángeles Caso, Fernando Sánchez Dragó, Clara Sánchez and Manuel Vicent, amongst others.

Read British Council Project Manager Fitch O'Connell's blog for more on Hay as it happened.

Further information and full archived programme at:

www.britishcouncil.es and www.hayfestival.com/segovia