Atwood, Schlag and Morris to receive Hay Festival Medals

Margaret Atwood, Evelyn Schlag and Jackie Morris have been named the recipients of this year’s Hay Festival Medals. 

The medals, which have been awarded since 2012, as inspired by the original Olympic medal given for poetry, will be awarded at the 31st edition in Wales (24th May to 3rd June) in Hay-on-Wye. 

The Handmaid's Tale author Margaret Atwood will be awarded the Hay Festival Medal for Prose "for a lifetime of ingenious and visionary fiction".

Austrian poet Evelyn Schlag will receive the Medal for Poetry for her contribution to the festival’s upcoming Armistice anthology. To mark the centenary of the Armistice, Hay had commissioned writers from around the world to respond to their country’s Great War poems with poetry of their own. 

Artist Jackie Morris will be given the Medal for Illustration for her collaboration with Robert Macfarlane, The Lost Words, that Hay described "a work of luminous beauty celebrating the natural world". It was the Hay Festival Book of the Year 2017.

Past medal recipients include Miranda Hart, Jeanette Winterson, Cressida Cowell, John le Carre and Alan Bennett

Peter Florence, director of Hay Festival, said: “Hay Festival Medals honour exceptional achievement, and this year we havre three world-class artists to honour in Margaret Atwood, Jackie Morris and Evelyn Schlag. It’s a real pleasure to welcome them to Hay.”

The Festival has released details of its 2018 programme.