Choose Love at Hay Festival

We're delighted to announce that Nicola Davies will be running a schools event at this years Hay Festival

Title: Choose Love Schools Event

Date: 26 May 2023, 10am

How would it feel being forced to leave your home? What circumstances would lead you to that decision? And what can be done to help those who have had to flee their lives and make a new start? As part of Hay Festival's Planet Assembly series, which aims to empower people to understand and act upon new knowledge, Nicola Davies will discuss the stories and experiences of real-life refugees who inspired the poems in her collection Choose Love, beautifully illustrated by Petr Horáček.

Choose Love 

Nicola Davies & Petr Horacek

Choose Love is a cycle of poems that highlights the experience of those forced to become refugees. The core of the collection was written in 2018 as part of a project with the charity Refugee Trauma Initiative.

With the permission of both individual refugees and aid workers, RTI shared with Nicola a number of true and poignant stories which were then used as the basis for short-form poems. Over the following years Nicola has added to this core of poems to create a coherent collection on the theme of forced migration, its wider causes and consequences. 

Nicola Davies is the author of more than 80 books including picture books, non-fiction, fiction and poetry for children and adults. She has written widely on many subjects including environmental science, children’s rights, disability, grief and refugees. Recently two of her titles The Day War Came and The King of the Sky were endorsed by Amnesty UK. 

Petr Horáček is an award winning illustrator and author of books for children. His books include The Best Place in the World, Puffin Peter, Blue Penguin, The Greedy Goat, Silly Suzy Goose and A New House for Mouse.