Peter Florence: ‘If there is a god, I hope they're like Margaret Atwood'

Telegraph

12-03-2025

Peter Florence doesn't go to the Hay Festival any more. 'I don't know much of what's going on at Hay,' he says quietly. 'I haven't been for a few years.'
The idea of Hay, the annual literary jamboree on the banks of the Wye that Bill Clinton famously dubbed the 'Woodstock of the mind', without Florence was unthinkable until recently. Florence started the festival in the Welsh Borders' 'town of books' with his parents, Norman and Rhoda, in 1988 and in the process made himself one of Britain's leading literary figures. Clinton spoke at Hay after leaving the White House, while Salman Rushdie made one of his first post-fatwa public appearances there and Maya Angelou was said to have conjured a rainbow through the sheer force of her poetry. (Coincidentally, Hay has just announced its 2025 line-up which includes Donald Trump's niece Mary and Strictly's Anton du Beke). Florence's contacts book was formidable, with friends including Stephen Fry and Camilla before she was Queen. He was awarded a CBE for services to literature and charity in 2018.
The wheels started to come off in 2020, when he was suspended by the festival's board after being accused of bullying staff. He had a breakdown and went on sick leave; the investigation continued and the complaints against him were upheld. Florence resigned the following August, claiming that he had not been 'afforded the opportunity to fully address or counter the internal issues raised and the board sought to entirely isolate me from the process'.
Sitting in a chilly West End café, Florence is giving his first newspaper interview since leaving Hay as he mounts something of a comeback. More than three years on, how does he reflect on leaving the festival he built from the ground up? 'It was very strange, and then I got ill,' he says before taking a long pause and lapsing into the sort of language a self-help author would use at a fringe Hay talk. 'And then I thought, I can either spend the next three years in legal argument, or I can learn what I've learned and move forward and be happy and do what I care about. So that, actually, is a very straightforward choice. And again, what do I know now that I didn't know before, and what am I going to do with it? The answer is complex and full of fascinating experiences.'
Florence, 60, is at pains not to criticise Hay, even though he clearly feels aggrieved at the manner of his departure. One suspects it has been too painful for him to consider going to the festival since he left, even though he lives in nearby Ludlow, because of his claim that he was hounded out without due process.
Despite no longer being involved in the festival he created, Florence has remained active as a roving international literature festival consultant and thinking about how to improve the form. His latest wheeze is The Conversation, a series of weekly talks at St Martin-in-the-Fields church at the north-east corner of Trafalgar Square where an eminent literary figure will be interviewed on stage before everybody – participant and audience alike – are invited into the crypt for drinks and the chance to discuss things further. Florence reckons that punters will be less nervous asking questions if they don't have to stand up with a microphone to do so.
'It's a very easy place to go and meet people, to sit around small tables and talk. And partly, I guess, you want to try and create that same sense of intimacy that you get from a book group, a book club that talks about what they've just witnessed,' says Florence. 'So you have an hour of inspiration, then you have an hour or hour-and-a-half of conversation.'
At the first event in January, Lindsey Hilsum, the Channel 4 News international editor, ended up talking to guests about their own experiences of living in cities under bombardment while answering questions from aspiring journalists about how to file reports while on the frontline. Guests in the rest of the spring series include Tom Holland, the historian and podcaster, discussing the lives of the Caesars, theatre director Nicholas Hytner and historian Helen Castor on Richard II and BBC man Fergal Keane exploring why he continues to be drawn to warzones despite being diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder.
Meeting Florence outside the church on a cold Wednesday morning, I notice an advertising banner that bills The Conversation as events that discuss 'conflict and empathy, inequality and power, climate crisis and wonder'. Following the second coming of Donald Trump, with the promises to 'drill, baby, drill' and undo woke dogmas, Florence could be forgiven for thinking that his ideas have already had their time. 'I don't think of this as a response to or engagement with Donald Trump, although he certainly ups the ante on the need for debate and the need for discussion,' he says.
So far, in its first full season, The Conversation has run on the strength of its ticket sales rather than because of the munificence of corporate donors. Which is probably for the best as Baillie Gifford, the giant fund manager that was one of the biggest supporters of the arts, was forced out of literature festivals last year amid a boycott led by green activists. Hay was one of those targeted for its association with Baillie Gifford, and its board bowed to demands of the Fossil Free Books group by cutting ties with one of its most important sponsors.
Florence has long been on the board of the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction, and one cannot help but think that if he were still at Hay the festival would have been more robust in defending its association with a fund manager that is widely seen as being a responsible investor in fossil fuel producers. Florence is keen to praise Australian writer Richard Flanagan for engaging with Baillie Gifford when he won the award in November – he said he would not take the £50,000 prize money until it published a strategy to get out of fossil fuel investments – rather than how Hay (and other festivals) cut their ties.
'I thought it was absolutely mesmerising, the impact of it,' he says of Flanagan's speech. 'Everybody came out of that better than they'd gone in. He made an extraordinary argument, incredibly persuasively. Baillie Gifford appeared to engage and accept it and welcome it, and everybody in the room felt that they had been in a moment which was rich in possibility of change and of progress.
'My observation of the Fossil Free Books – I don't know how to describe it, campaign? – is that everybody came out of it badly.' Florence was in Iceland planting trees as part of a European literature festival afforestation project when the Baillie Gifford row kicked off last summer, and says he does not know what sort of pressure festival directors came under. But he hints that the protestors were naïve with how they went about things – especially as many festivals have said they will not be able to return this summer absent the funding.
'I'm not sure that what the Fossil Free Books people intended was the depletion of festivals, almost all of which were forums for increased awareness and engagement,' he says. 'The thing for literature festivals is, there's a lot of politics, there's a lot of argument… Storytelling and argument are the point of literature festivals. So do you want to have them, or don't you? Or do you want them to behave like this or like that? And maybe if you want to have a literature festival that behaves in this way maybe you should just start your literature festival and make it behave in that way. I don't know. I think there are no simple answers.'
However, he does seem pragmatic enough to know that no sponsor would ever be truly free of controversy to everyone, everywhere. 'There hasn't been a time in history, whether it was the Catholic Church or the King or the Arts Council or the corporations or whoever it is that's the patron of the arts,' he says. 'There are going to be tensions which you have to resolve one way or another for the best delivery to the public.'
The great controversy Florence caused before all the Hay unpleasantness was when, as chairman of the Booker Prize jury in 2019, he jointly awarded it to Bernardine Evaristo and Margaret Atwood, for Girl, Woman, Other and The Testaments, respectively. Critics said that the decision, which violated long-standing Booker rules, was a fudge that satisfied nobody – as well as forcing Evaristo and Atwood to not just share the spotlight but split the prize money.
Florence is unrepentant. 'I wouldn't change the decision, and I'm glad that we found a decision that we all as judges liked,' he says. 'I learned more about fiction in that year than I had in the previous, I don't know, 30 years of working in the literature industry.' He insists that the idea to jointly award the prize was not his, as was widely reported at the time, but 'it came from one of my fellow judges'.
The reason for the split award was, he says now, born from an unwillingness to choose after a year of intensive debates. 'If you have got four other people whose opinions and experiences you treasure, and you've been through it together, you don't want to say 'How do we compromise?', but 'How do we reflect the idea that there are books here we really love and want to champion?''
As for the idea that Atwood cast a shadow over Evaristo, Florence gives that short shrift. 'You could read it that way, or you could read it that it's doubled: that Bernardine Evaristo sits on the same shelf as Margaret Atwood, who sits on the same shelf actually as the other shortlisted writers as well. As a jury we thought of it as raising everybody up, rather than… In retrospect, I think it's hard on the [four] who didn't win. But at the time, I think it reflected our experience as a jury.
'Both books have done well. Bernardine Evaristo is huge and important: she's important in the literary world… she's a really significant, visible hero,' he says. 'And Margaret Atwood is… if there were a god, I'd hope that they were as much like Margaret Atwood as it's possible to be. They are oddly complimentary books. So you look and think one of them takes down the patriarchy, the other reverses a massively un-diverse story. I want everybody to read both of them, actually.'