Looking for Literature by Peter Leyland
Looking for Literature, an Autofictional Adventure* I had come to Hay-on-Wye at the suggestion of a friend. You could say, I suppose that I was looking for love as well as literature, although the two things in my mind were very close together. It was the Whit half-term, and I was eager to fill the space imposed on me by the five-day holiday. For busy parents it was always too full, but for me, who normally had charge of their offspring, it was often empty. The Hay-on-Wye Literary Festival at the time had been going for about a year and was still very much a work in progress. It had been organised at a number of venues in the centre of a town which was famous for its many second-hand bookshops. The most well-known of these was that of Richard Booth, the King of Hay, and some of the booksellers there were not always too keen on the influx of literary tourists, me being one. I had, however, managed to get a single room in a wonderful hotel called The Seven Stars in the centr...