Hay Festival's Caroline Michel's Pimlico home is a treasure trove of books and antiques (2020)
Having decided a career in law was not for her, Caroline Michel began working for the literary journal Agenda. Every so often, she would submit her own poems under a false name to its founder and editor, William Cookson. ‘This is rather good,’ she would say, flagging up one of her latest works, only for it ‘to be turned down immediately’, leaving Caroline with the somewhat bruising task of rejecting her own writing.
Despite those early dismissals, she has been at the centre of the publishing world for over three decades. Agenda was followed by a job at Chatto & Windus. She worked long into the night, rallying contributors for Tamasin Day-Lewis’s The Englishwoman’s Kitchen, and eventually secured a role in the publicity department. Stints followed at Vintage, HarperCollins and the William Morris Agency.
Today, she is CEO of literary and talent agency Peters, Fraser + Dunlop, representing clients such as Jeanette Winterson, Bear Grylls, Edna O’Brien and Rose Tremain. It is no longer a world ruled by paperback and hardback; now there are e-books, audiobooks, podcasts, and TV and film rights to consider. The modes for transmitting the message have changed, but, according to Caroline, good storytelling never goes out of fashion: ‘One of the great things about being human is our desire to explain what we feel and think, to share and understand what it is to be human, and we do this through storytelling. There is this magical connection that people have with literature and it is getting more and more powerful with all these different formats and distribution lines.’
Caroline is a people person, as anyone who knows her will attest, and hers is a people business. By her own admission, she ‘turns up to the opening of an envelope, because you never know who you’re going to meet’. This insatiable curiosity is well served in her role as chair of Hay Festival. This year will mark 32 years since the 10-day-long event was conceived around a kitchen table at the home of the actor and theatre manager Norman Florence, his wife, the actress Rhoda Lewis, and their son Peter, who was then in his early twenties.
Caroline’s became chair of Hay in 2015, but has been an advocate since the festival’s inception: ‘I remember the early days with everyone from Tom Wolfe to Salman Rushdie, Ian McEwan, Ted Hughes and Seamus Heaney – we all had a conviction that Hay was different.’ Caroline attributes the success of the festival to ‘its championing of empathy and curiosity. Stories and truths are told, ideas are shared, and everyone is encouraged to imagine the world from other perspectives and with renewed hope’. Authors such as Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison and Margaret Atwood have joined politicians, scientists, historians and musicians in making the pilgrimage to the tent in the Welsh car park, disregarding seas of mud and torrents of rain, in the name of sharing stories and ideas.
Each May, 350,000 people come through Hay-on-Wye, 10-12,000 of whom are schoolchildren. ‘You can stand in this swirling mass of people going from event to event and hear all the excitement, or the fury because they disagree with something that they have heard, or the anticipation when they are about to see someone talk,’ says Caroline. ‘The audiences are tough and engaged, and that’s why we love them.’
‘The only person who had avoided the siren call of Hay was Gabriel García Márquez,’ she recalls. And so, in 2006, Peter Florence took his small corner of Wales to Colombia and launched Hay Festival Cartagena de Indias. ‘Everything was done with armed guards and one of our team was kidnapped but we ran a festival,’ says Caroline. ‘The Colombian government is hugely supportive, because they say that we have changed the conversation around the country. We have made it one of culture and literature.’ Further iterations of the Hay Festival now exist in Mexico, Spain and Peru.
Despite her peripatetic lifestyle, Caroline has lived in the same patch of south-west London almost all her life. In November 2017, she and her three children moved into a gloriously wonky house in Pimlico. With only one week to go before the Peters, Fraser + Dunlop office descended for the annual Christmas party, Caroline called on the help of antique dealer Josephine Ryan, who, she says, ‘has an amazing eye for the unusual’. Together, they managed the whole move in two days. ‘At first I didn’t love it, but I think you have to wriggle into a house – you have to feel a bit uncomfortable and slowly find your place there.’
In keeping with her strong views on the importance of the cultural exchange of ideas, Caroline is also a trustee of Somerset House, a vice-president of The London Library and chair of the BFI Trust: ‘The BFI’s film archive is so valuable in helping us understand who we are and where we’ve come from.’ Meanwhile, Somerset House is providing affordable studios for artists and makers under its courtyard to encourage them to stay in the capital. ‘It’s so important to keep creativity at the heart of the city and not banish it to the outskirts,’ Caroline declares.
‘London is an extraordinary place,’ she says. ‘It is a city where people have a willingness to engage with one another – it’s the people who keep us connected to humanity, society, culture and ideas.’ And at the centre of this cultural whirligig is Caroline, ensuring the hunt for good stories never ceases.
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Paul Massey3/5At the London Library, of which Caroline is a vice-president, with its head of communications Julian Lloyd.
Paul Massey4/5In her office at the literary and talent agency Peters, Fraser + Dunlop, where she has been CEO since 2007.
Paul Massey5/5At The River Café in Hammersmith with friends Ruth Rogers (one of the restaurant’s founders) and Philippa Walker.
