Time to shine at the Telegraph Hay Festival 2013 It is not the only one on these literary islands. There are more than 300 literary festivals now and they sound like lists of nobles in Shakespeare - Edinburgh, Cheltenham, Bath, Brighton, Keswick.... large and small, mapping the country, venerated sites of literary engagement. They abolish the current blues about books, they form moveable feasts for writers and readers alike, they challenge all the lazy notions of dumbing down, they portray the vigour and the confidence of the best of us. Tents can have problems. One year I interviewed Joseph Heller, who had just made a recovery from an operation on his throat. His voice was not at full strength. It rained. It poured. The canvas sagged with the weight of it and the drumming noise of the water drowned out the speaker. But the audience did not yield. No one left until the end. The applause was ungrudging. Joe was rather pleased. It's a place where you can hear philosophers and clergymen going around in circles about God, and poets energised perhaps of Bardic Wales enrapturing audiences. Ian McEwan has used the Hay audiences as a laboratory for his work in progress. Gordon Brown, like other politicians, has found that a book festival gives him the audience he feels he surely deserves. In the green room, the writers" own tent, faces tell one of two tales. Either grim, abstracted, pale, waiting to go on. Or flushed, bucked up and looking for a drink after the session. Martin Amis wrote a short story about a time when poets and novelists became the rock stars of the festival circuit. For a couple of weeks, this modest destination shares just a bit in the contemporary glamour of rock festivals, and I have an uneasy feeling that such a dubious eventuality could be getting closer. But we are a non-celebrity sect. There is something of the pilgrimage about us, our Ladies of Walsingham Hilary Mantel, Claire Tomalin, A.S. Byatt ... it seems we want to congregate and travel as a group to become part of the congregation of common readers. Because for all the excited talk of crowds and numbers, what happens at Hay is that one individual talks or reads to another individual, both of whom are part of a large company. For novelists, if I am a useful example, it is a rare and valuable opportunity to meet readers. At Hay I can mingle with and talk to those who have read my books in much the same way I'd guess as that in which I wrote them - solitude and silence. Poets have always been wise and shrewd enough to speak in public. Dramatists can go and watch their work and hear their words thrown at an audience. But novelists for a long time were penned into the back room. We wrote, we delivered, sometimes there was a brisk sherry party send-off and then back into the box. Now at Hay and elsewhere, we can have our moment. What Toni Morrison called "our time to shine." It's the meeting place of our tribe. Melvyn Bragg will be speaking about his new novel, Grace and Mary, on Saturday May 25 at 2:30pm To order a printed copy of the full festival brochure, go to hayfestival.org. All events can be booked online or should you have any queries, phone the Box Office on 01497 822 629.