Hansel & Gretel: The Laureate and the Illuminator

2024 Hay Festival
Event 335. Simon Armitage and Clive Hicks-Jenkins
Hansel & Gretel: The Laureate and the Illuminator
Saturday 1 June 2024, 8.30pm – Wye Stage.

Tickets are £15.00 and are available from the Festival website.

Simon Armitage’s reinvention of a fairy tale, Hansel & Gretel: A Nightmare in Eight Scenes, was published by Faber & Faber in 2023. It’s the third book by the Poet Laureate to be illustrated by Clive Hicks-Jenkins, following Sir Gawain & the Green Knight in 2018 and The Owl and the Nightingale in 2021.

The Poet Laureate and the artist/illustrator hold a conversation with pictures, talking about their experiences of working together and reading favourite passages from the three books. Hicks-Jenkins directed and designed the music theatre production with actors and puppets of Armitage’s Hansel & Gretel when it premiered in 2018, and two members of the original cast make a special appearance.

Original illustrations from the books can be seen in Clive’s exhibition at local art gallery The Table, Hay-on-Wye, from Thursday 23 May to Saturday 22 June.

Adventures in Books: Clive Hicks-Jenkins on Illustrating Heaney, Armitage and Homer. The Table, Hay on Wye, 18th May - 22nd June 2024

An exhibition of original artworks by Clive Hicks-Jenkins produced as illustrations for editions published by Folio Society, Faber & Faber and Design for Today. Included will be original pen and ink drawings for the 2023 Folio Society edition of Beowulf in the translation by Seamus Heaney, and illustrations made for Simon Armitage’s The Owl and the Nightingale and Hansel & Gretel: a Nightmare in Eight Scenes published by Faber & Faber. Additionally there will be maquettes preparatory to the artist’s work on Folio Society’s forthcoming editions of Homer’s The Odyssey and The Iliad in Emily Wilson’s critically lauded translations.

Beowulf for Folio Society

Clive Hicks-Jenkins has illustrated a new edition of Seamus Heaney’s translation of Beowulf for Folio Society. With an introduction by Dr Janina Ramirez, the title has been produced as a ‘special edition’. The book is leather bound and comes cased in an embossed, cloth-covered clam-shell box and with an added print suitable for framing.