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Hello and welcome to Health Check.
I'm Claudia Hammond and today we're somewhere a bit different.
I'm at the Hay Festival in Wales in the UK.
Audience, can you give us a cheer to show us you're here?
This is a festival of literature and arts where hundreds of people
queue up to get into tents to hear authors talk about their books.
And so we thought we would delve into what reading fiction does for our minds, our imaginations and our well-being.
We hear a lot about why it's good for children to read.
But how about adults?
Do you find that novels stay with you in your mind long after you finish them?
Are you disappointed when you see a film adaptation and the characters look and sound all wrong?
And does reading novels make us more human?
And to discuss all this and more I have with me someone who knows all about writing fiction,
award-winning novelist Joanna Kavenna, whose latest novel Seven came out earlier this year.
And Ben Alderson-Day, who's professor of psychology at Durham University,
and lead researcher for ReaderBank, which is a project studying reading, imagination and well-being.
And he's the author of Presence.
And Dr Paula Byrne, who's a novelist, biographer of Jane Austen,
and a co-founder in the UK of ReLit, the Bibliotherapy Foundation,