Several literary prizes are showcased at Hay. At events sprinkled throughout the 10-day festival, judges appear alongside shortlisted writers to read and discuss the work and, in some cases, to announce the winners. There's plenty of offstage chat too, as professionals and punters pick their favourites and try to predict who'll win.

BBC FOUR Samuel Johnson Prize
This is the UK's most valuable non-fiction prize, awarded to celebrate originality and diversity. The winner scoops £30,000, and all six shortlisted authors win £1,000 each. The winner will be announced on 15 June at an awards dinner at The Savoy Hotel in London.

This year’s shortlist is:
Gulag: A history of the Soviet camps by Anne Applebaum
John Clare: A biography by Jonathan Bate
A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson
Stasiland: Stories from behind the Berlin Wall by Anna Funder
The Zanzibar Chest: A memoir of love and war by Aidan Hartley
Rubicon: The triumph and tragedy of the Roman republic by Tom Holland

Chair of the judges, Michael Wood, praises the books for their ‘compelling and stylistically innovative adventures in travel and politics’.

Saturday 5 June at 1pm Michael Wood and fellow judges discuss issues arising from the shortlisted books.

Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize
Jasper Fforde has just won this year’s prize for The Well of Lost Plots. This is the third novel in his series featuring literary detective Thursday Next. It’s a suitably skittish winner of this annual prize for a comic novel, established in honour of PG Wodehouse and jointly sponsored by Everyman, who publish Wodehouse’s books, and champagne house Bollinger. Fforde wins a complete set of Everyman Wodehouse, a case of Bollinger Grande Année 1996, and a Gloucester Old Spot pig now named after his novel (lucky creature).

Saturday 5 June at 8.30pm Reading by Jasper Fforde and shortlisted writers Andrey Kurkov, Deborah Moggach and Alexei Sayle.

Gwobr Madoc – otherwise known as The Madoc Award
Travel writing prize named after Madoc, a 12th century Welsh prince who, Welsh legend has it, travelled to America and settled there with his followers. They soon intermarried with the Mandan people, giving rise to the Mandan myths of the white man and his great canoe… Yes, really. (Intrigued? Track down a copy of the cult novel The Dreamstone by the writer of this website.)

Sponsored by the Wales Tourist Board and given for ‘excellence in writing about place’, this year’s winner, newly announced at Hay, is Alex Holmes, for his documentary films about Dunkirk, which weave together veterans’ testimony, letters and previously unseen archive footage. The prize is a work specially commissioned from an artist celebrated in the Welsh National Eisteddfod exhibition.

Hay Festival Prize
Awarded for the first time this year, this is a peer recognition prize when writers attending the festival elect to honour one of their number for their work. The first winner of the award, just announced at the opening banquet, is John Updike. He gets to enjoy the public acclaim of his fellow writers – and $30,000.

Wales Book of the Year
Books, plural, actually – the prize, administered by the Academi and supported by the Arts Council of Wales, goes each year to one book in Welsh and one in English.

The shortlist has just been announced at Hay, with all six shortlisted authors appearing. The shortlist (three books in each language) is:
Stump, a novel by Niall Griffiths
Old People are a Problem, short stories by Emyr Humphreys
Keeping Mum, poems by Gwyneth Lewis Gororau
-r iaigh, literary criticism on RS Thomas by Jason Walford Davies
Llwch Cenhedloedd, an account of Welsh involvement in the American Civil War by Jerry Hunter
Dyn Yr Eiliad, a novel by Owen Martell

The shortlisted writers get £1,000 each. The two winners will be announced on 17 June and will win £3,000 each.

Orange Essentials
The Orange Prize for Fiction – open to any woman writing in English – is one of the UK’s most valuable novel prizes. The winner gets £30,000 and a bronze work of art, not to mention literary kudos and a useful boost to sales from the publicity.

On this year’s shortlist are:
Purple Hibiscus by Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche
Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood
The Great Fire by Shirley Hazzard
Small Island by Andrea Levy
Ice Road by Gillian Slovo
The Colour by Rose Tremain

The winner will be announced on 8 June. Andrea Levy appears at the festival, and a special Orange Prize for Fiction weekend runs across 5 and 6 June, with events exploring women’s fiction from different angles. There’s also the Orange Essentials event, where a library of 50 living writers is announced, compiled from nominations by readers. Everyone attending the event will be entered into a draw: the winner gets to donate the library of 50 books to the school of their choice.

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Jasper Fforde, who won this year's Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize at a recent National Reading Campaign Swap a Book Day event © The National Literacy Trust 2004