Maya Angelou's stunning performance at the 2002 Hay Festival had the audience in hysterics and tears. The clips on this page offer exclusive highlights.

FOUR FACTS ABOUT MAYA:

• Maya Angelou was born Marguerite Annie Johnson in 1928 in St Louis Missouri, in the American South. She took the name Maya Angelou when she became a cabaret artist in her late twenties



• She was raped by her mother's boyfriend when she was seven, and for five years afterwards communicated only with her brother Bailey. She writes about her ordeal in I Know why the Caged Bird Sings: "I was 7 and a half and I thought that my voice had killed him, that if I hadn't spoken his name, if I hadn't spoken, that the man would still be alive and so I took responsibility for his death and stopped talking"



• A Song Flung Up to Heaven is set in 1964, in the midst of the American civil rights movement, when Angelou worked alongside Malcolm X and Martin Luther King



• She has recently received a lifetime achievement award by the Ethnic Multicultural Media Awards