Hay Festival 2012: between reality and dreams I think it was always about the craic. I can remember a bunch of us sitting around my mother's kitchen table, 25-and-a-bit years ago, and my father talking about poetry and ideas and music. I can remember dreaming about meeting heroes and changing minds. And my mother said, "It's got to be a party." That's how the Hay Festival was born, and it's been a blast. What a ridiculously lucky, happy journey. There's an element of straight celebrity. That's the easy bit to follow. And it's helped by the fact that people who are good with words are often very funny, as if wit were the highest form of verbal skill and play. There's an element too of homage and guru-like devotion. It seems to me there's a direct correlation between the passion with which you want to meet someone and the degree to which that person may have changed your life. One of the many things book writers do is communicate on an intensely personal and intimate level with their readers. There are people who've been liberated by books, been recognised and enlightened, and they know that the writer has created that revolution in their lives. That's an amazing bond and one that creates a very special relationship. But here's the thing that I think I've learned about writers appearing in person and their appeal. It's not like meeting an iconic star whose voice you know and whose music and lyrics have rocked your world. Nor is it the glamorous high of seeing how smart/ skinny/ old and gorgeous Rob Lowe, Vanessa Redgrave and Ralph Fiennes might be or how much taller and funnier and more articulate all those front-line journalists are off the telly. Those are all variants of familiarity and the real world. The thing about writers and particularly novelists is the alluring mystery of their being unknown and unreal. Partly, of course, it's that they're disembodied names or initials on a paper spine. But even more than that, it is the fact they operate in the space between reality and dreaming. They imagine the world not how it is, but how it might be if you were released from being the person you are. They reconnect you with the fantastical world that is the greatest gift of being a child. And in remaking the world they make a case for human rights - not just legal rights, but the rights to live and love and die in freedom. Even - especially - if it is the freedom of the imagination. For 48 hours, today and tomorrow, Telegraph readers can book tickets for events at the Telegraph Hay Festival online, before booking opens to the general public from Monday. Priority booking for Telegraph readers Hay festival box office Online: hayfestival.org/boxoffice