Education
Born in Budapest on 9 February 1944, Hay was educated at Haileybury and Imperial Service College near Hertford, England, and read classics and literature at Merton College, Oxford.
Born in Budapest on 9 February 1944, Hay was educated at Haileybury and Imperial Service College near Hertford, England, and read classics and literature at Merton College, Oxford.
He emigrated to Canada in 1967 and taught at Simon Fraser University and at Western Washington University in the United States. Before moving to southern California in 1980, he founded the play publishing arm of Talonbooks, a Canadian cultural publisher, and was responsible for publishing the plays of dozens of Canadian playwrights. After working in the professional theatre world, including as the first dramaturg of the Vancouver Playhouse Theatre Company, he was a dramaturg at the O"Neill Playwrights Conference in Waterford, Connecticut, and at the early Sundance Institute Playwrights Workshops in the early 1980s.
While teaching in Los Angeles at University of Southern California and University of California, Los Angeles, he, together with Didi Conn, Ethan Phillips, and Virginia Morris, co-founded First Stage, a Hollywood non-profit organization that helps writers develop new scripts for the stage and screen, and for which he holds the title of Founding Artistic Director.
He retired to British Columbia in 2008.