Former Tory minister admits at festival that he felt a fraud due to need to give the impression he was in three places at once

Former Conservative MP Rory Stewart found being a politician “very yucky” and felt like a fraud, he told an audience at Hay festival on Saturday.

Asked whether he would consider going back into politics, he said that he found being a politician “personally very, very unpleasant” and “didn’t like it”, adding: “I feel like a fraud all the time, in a whole series of ways.”

Author of novel Prophet Song about an imagined fascist Ireland tells Hay audience he is not a political writer

“I miss my solitude,” last year’s Booker prize winner Paul Lynch told an audience at Hay festival on Saturday.

“In many ways I didn’t sign up for this. I’m an introvert who’s learned how to be social, a social introvert,” he said. “I signed up to sit in a room on my own for three or four years and write a book,” he said.

Cat Bohannon tells Hay festival audience it is not known why men go through life ‘smuggling two little death nuggets’

Whether it is the fountain of youth or the elixir of life, men have travelled the world looking for the key to increasing their longevity.

They should be looking a bit closer to home, according to one leading researcher – although after they do, they might end up taking the years God intended for them.

Author of Anansi’s Gold, a nonfiction account of a notorious Ghanian conman ‘told with biting wit’, wins £1,000 award

Yepoka Yeebo has won the 2024 Jhalak prize for her nonfiction book about a Ghanaian con artist.

Anansi’s Gold is an “exhilarating journey” through the life and “almost unbelievable” adventures of John Ackah Blay-Miezah, “told with great panache and a biting wit,” said prize director Sunny Singh.

• Games will not be drug free but technology much improved
• World Athletics president admits security will be ‘complicated’

Sebastian Coe has admitted the Paris Olympics this summer will not be drug free, but his fervent hope is that they will be cleaner than previous games.

Asked at the Hay Festival on Wednesday whether he thought the Games, which begin on 26 July, will be free from drugs controversy, the World Athletics president said that “the answer to that is, sadly, no”.

Friends, family and colleagues will celebrate the author with tributes and readings at St Martin-in-the-Fields church with limited tickets available for members of the public

A celebration of the author Martin Amis, who died last May aged 73, is due to be held in London next month.

Friends, family and colleagues of Amis will gather at St Martin-in-the-Fields church in Trafalgar Square on 10 June for the event, which will include tributes and readings from the writer’s body of work.

Cărtărescu’s novel Solenoid, translated by Sean Cotter, was described by judges as ‘wildly inventive with passages of great beauty’

Romanian author Mircea Cărtărescu and American translator Sean Cotter have won the €100,000 Dublin literary award for the novel Solenoid.

“By turns wildly inventive, philosophical and lyrical, with passages of great beauty, Solenoid is the work of a major European writer who is still relatively little-known to English-language readers,” said the judges.

Erpenbeck is the first German writer and Michael Hofmann the first male translator to win the £50,000 prize for novel which tells the story of a relationship set against the collapse of East Germany

Jenny Erpenbeck and Michael Hofmann have won the 2024 International Booker prize for Erpenbeck’s “personal and political” novel Kairos, translated by Hofmann from German.

Erpenbeck is the first German writer to win, while Hofmann is the first male translator to win. The £50,000 prize money will be split equally between the pair.

Novelist, who teaches at New York University, says he finds it strange that progressive students currently ‘kind of support a fascist terrorist group’

Salman Rushdie has said that the formation of a Palestinian state “right now” would mean a “Taliban-like state” is created.

Commenting on the US campus protesters calling for a free Palestine, the author said that while he has “argued for a Palestinian state for most of my life – since the 1980s, probably – right now, if there was a Palestinian state, it would be run by Hamas, and that would make it a Taliban-like state, and it would be a client state of Iran”.

Butler is among several writers refusing to appear at the literary festival over sponsor Baillie Gifford’s alleged involvement in ‘technology and arms in Israel’

Labour MP Dawn Butler and author Grace Blakeley are among those who have withdrawn from scheduled appearances at Hay festival over its sponsorship by investment management firm Baillie Gifford.

Butler said in a video posted to X that she was withdrawing from the literary festival because Baillie Gifford is “involved directly or indirectly in technology and arms in Israel”.