Down in Hay

Another year, another Hay festival, and welcome one and all to our festival blog, which is now in its second year. Yes: once again we've selflessly dragged ourselves out of Farringdon and up to Herefordshire to cover the proceedings for the unhappy souls who can't make it. Truly, we are martyrs to the cause.

Driving the debate

Thinking of driving to Hay? ... read on. Photograph: Mike Kittrell/AP.

Al Gore – reborn to run?

Martin Kettle: The former vice president is on the road again, promoting his climate change movie. Many wish he would run again for the White House.

Hay festival highlights

Spoilt for choice? From Seamus Heaney and Sarah Waters to Salman Rushdie and Al Gore - our pick of the highlights from this year's programme.

Literary invaders in the wake of Francis Drake

Deckchairs, umbrellas, bookshops at every corner, people stuffed into marquees apologising profusely as they bump the elbows of their tweed jackets into one other. The Hay festival is a special literary event.

In Cat Ballou jeans at 67, Fonda wows the west

The queen of this year's Guardian Hay book festival - the largest literary festival in the world - arrived on its closing day with blond-highlighted hair and turquoise earrings in a beige suede trouser suit, to discuss her autobiography, My Life So Far, and was taken to the hearts of listeners who have grown up repeating her lines.

Bubbly and share of pig for winner of Wodehouse prize

Marina Lewycka's first novel, A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian, a comedy poised between the cultures and languages of the former Soviet republic and provincial England, won the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse prize for comic fiction. Her achievement, which was announced at the Guardian Hay book festival on its closing day, brought Lewycka only a jeroboam of champagne and a symbolic share of a Wodehousian pig.

Crime writer with a twist

The prizes awarded to the authors honoured by a new competition for prison writing would not cover the cost of the invitation card for other Hay bashes. The winner gets a £20 phone card, the runners up £5 cards. Clive Hopwood, of the Writers in Prison organisation, joint organisers of the competition, said: "In the best tradition of the Oscars, most of our winners can't be with us today."

Nicolas Roeg interview: his brilliant career

How did Nicolas Roeg go from lowly cameraman to the legendary director of Don’t Look Now, Performance and The Man Who Fell to Earth? In a rare interview, he tells all to Jason Wood. Read the full, unedited transcript.

Hay days

Tiffany Murray is a longtime friend of the Hay festival, but this year, as well as helping out, she read from her debut novel, Happy Accidents, at an event with Audrey Niffenegger and Diana Evans. From gout and pigs to clashes with Goldie Hawn, she kept a diary of her time in Hay.