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Peter Florence is a British festival director,\u200b\u200b notable for founding the Hay Festival with his\u200b parents, Norman\u200b\xa0and Rhoda Florence\u200b. FYI t\u200bhe first festival \u200bwas financed with\xa0winnings from a poker game.

Peter\u200b \u200bwas educated at Ipswich School, Jesus College, Cambridge, and the University of Paris and has an MA in Modern and Medieval Literatures. He holds honorary doctorates from \u200bfour universities\u200b.

\u200bHe has replicated the success of Hay in numerous\xa0cities around the world, launching\xa0similar festivals in Mantua, Segovia, the Alhambra Palace, Cartagena, Nairobi, Zacatecas, Thiruvananthapuram, Dhaka, Xalapa, Belfast and Paraty.

He is the co-editor of the Oxtales and Oxtravels anthologies with Mark Ellingham of Profile Books, in partnership with Oxfam\u200b\xa0\u200band\xa0has written for\xa0\u200bthe\u200b\xa0Index on Censorship\u200b,\xa0The Guardian\u200b,\xa0The Telegraph\u200b,\xa0The Spectator\u200b and numerous other publications.\u200b

\u200b"\u200bFlorence chaired the jury of the 2019 Man Booker Prize for Fiction, and controversially defied the foundation\u2019s 1993-established rules to award the prize to two authors. Bernardine Evaristo - the first black woman to be awarded the prize - shared the prize with Margaret Atwood\u200b." ( unfortunately, I failed to ask him about this). \u200b

\u200bHe\xa0and his wife Becky Shaw have four sons. They live in Herefordshire. Peter was awarded\xa0an MBE in 2005 for services to Arts and Culture\u200b and\u200b\xa0a CBE in 2018 for services to Literature and Charity\u200b. \xa0 We met via Zoom to talk, among other things, about Hay's recent on-line, Covid-driven 2020 event and how Peter plans to capitalize on its enormous success, about what special ingredients are required to put on good festivals and interesting sessions, about the English language, party animals, translation, what makes Peter happy, and the titles of his favourite recent reads.\xa0