WHEN it comes to making a living by dressing up as a giant housefly, Mike Barfield more or less has the market cornered.

He's been touring local schools with his performance show Swat! A Fly's Guide to Staying Alive, and next week he's set to appear at the prestigious Hay Festival.

The show – based on his humorous illustrated book of the same name – features everything from demonstrations about how to avoid a man-sized fly swat, to escaping a nine-foot-long chameleon tongue and giving children the chance to 'taste' food with their feet. "Scientifically accurate and great fun for any child who enjoys death, destruction, peril and poo," says the blurb to his Hay performance.

Mike, 51, from Helperby, was inspired by his son Jacob to write the book his show is based upon. "When he was at primary school he was obsessed with carnivorous plants," says the writer and cartoonist. "He went from dinosaurs to carnivorous plants."

So when looking around for an idea for a children's book, the answer seemed obvious. "I thought, 'Oh! A survival guide for flies!''"

The book is told from the point of view of a fly who is handing out friendly advice to other flies about how to escape the many perils of flydom.

"Everything eats flies," says Mike, who has a degree in biology. "Birds, lizards, spiders of course, even nice pretty things like dragonflies. Flies really are the lowest members of the totem pole."

But they have survival mechanisms, he says. "Huge eyes for spotting movement, and little hairs that can detect air movement." That's why swatting them is so difficult. Chalk one up for the humble fly.

Mike is one of four local authors who will be staging a mini-invasion of the Hay Festival next week.

He'll be joined by Anneliese Emmans Dean, author of Buzzing! - a collection of quirky, oddball poems celebrating the insects and other tiny creatures; Matt Haig, whose first novel for young adults, Echo Boy, is described as "a poignant and beautifully-written story about love, loss and what makes us truly human'; and Kjartan Poskitt who, in his book Murderous Maths, puts the fun – plus a bit of mayhem – back into mathematics.

• Mike Barfield, Anneliese Emmans Dean and and Matt Haig all appear separately at the Hay Festival on Wednesday May 28. Kjartan Poskitt appears on Saturday May 31. For more details of the Hay Festival, visit hayfestival.com