5x15

Sarah Churchwell is Professor of American Literature and Chair of Public Understanding of the Humanities at the School of Advanced Study, University of London. She is the author of Careless People: Murder, Mayhem and The Invention of The Great Gatsby and The Many Lives of Marilyn Monroe. Her literary journalism has appeared widely in newspapers and she comments regularly on arts, culture, and politics for television and radio. She lives in London. 5x15 brings together outstanding individuals to tell of their lives and inspirations. This talk was recorded at the online 5x15 event on 5th Nov 2020. Learn more about 5x15 events: 5x15stories.com Twitter: www.twitter.com/5x15stories Facebook: www.facebook.com/5x15stories Instagram: www.instagram.com/5x15stories

John Micklethwait CBE, editor-in-chief of Bloomberg News and former editor-in-chief of The Economist from 2006-2015, is the author of a new essay called The Wake-Up Call. He argues that Covid-19 has brutally exposed the weaknesses of Western governments. But what can be done to fix the failings that we’re daily more aware of? 5x15 brings together outstanding individuals to tell of their lives, passions and inspirations. There are only two rules - no scripts and only 15 minutes each. Learn more about 5x15 events: 5x15stories.com Twitter: www.twitter.com/5x15stories Facebook: www.facebook.com/5x15stories Instagram: www.instagram.com/5x15stories

Jung Chang was born in Sichuan Province, China, in 1952. During the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) she worked as a peasant, a ‘barefoot’ doctor, a steelworker, and an electrician before becoming an English-language student at Sichuan University. She left China for Britain in 1978 and obtained a PhD in Linguistics in 1982 at the University of York - the first person from Communist China to receive a doctorate from a British university. Jung Chang is the author of the best-selling books Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China (which the Asian Wall Street Journal called the most read book about China), and Mao: The Unknown Story (with Jon Halliday). Her books have been translated into more than 40 languages and sold more than 15 million copies, in addition to millions in pirated editions and computer downloads in mainland China where both books are banned. Jung Chang has received honorary doctorates from the Universities of Buckingham, York and Warwick, the Open University, UK, and Bowdoin College, USA. 5x15 brin

Monty Don OBE is a well-known gardening writer and broadcaster. He lives with his family, garden and dogs in Herefordshire. His books include the Sunday Times bestseller Nigel, The Jewel Garden, Paradise Gardens and Japanese Gardens with Derry Moore, which was shortlisted for the Edward Stanford Travel Awards. His most recent books are; My Garden World and American Gardens. 5x15 brings together outstanding individuals to tell of their lives and inspirations. This talk was recorded at the online 5x15 event on 2nd September 2020. Learn more about 5x15 events: 5x15stories.com Twitter: www.twitter.com/5x15stories Facebook: www.facebook.com/5x15stories Instagram: www.instagram.com/5x15stories

Our second event in the Earth Convention series looks at creating a green transition in energy and finance that can help us move towards a sustainable recovery from the pandemic. How is business organising itself for climate action? We will look at technology, the role of the state and lessons from the 2008 financial crisis. Speakers: Jonathon Porritt is Co-Founder of Forum for the Future, a writer, broadcaster and campaigner on sustainable development. His latest book is Hope in Hell: A decade to confront the climate emergency. Mike Berners-Lee is a professor of sustainability at Lancaster University and the founder of Small World Consulting. He is also the author of How Bad Are Bananas, The Burning Question and There Is No Planet B. Farhana Yamin is an internationally recognised environmental lawyer, climate change and development policy expert, CEO of Track 0 and Coordinator of Camden Think & Do. Matt Crossman is the stewardship director for Rathbones. He also leads thematic engagement with companies on E

Lee Child was born in Coventry, raised in Birmingham, and now lives in the USA. It is said one of his novels featuring his hero Jack Reacher is sold somewhere in the world every nine seconds. His books consistently achieve the number-one slot on bestseller lists around the world and have sold over one hundred million copies. Lee is the recipient of many awards, most recently Author of the Year at the 2019 British Book Awards. He was appointed CBE in the 2019 Queen’s Birthday Honours. The event will be ahead of the publication of his new book The Sentinel – the 25th in the series, the first written in collaboration with his brother Andrew – coming out on 27th October 2020. Lee Child will be joined in conversation by 5x15’s own Jack Reacher obsessive, Rosie Boycott. 5x15 brings together five outstanding individuals to tell of their lives, passions and inspirations. There are only two rules - no scripts and only 15 minutes each. Learn more about 5x15 events: 5x15stories.com Twitter: www.twitter.com/5x15stori

Acclaimed by the Guardian as the ‘Sapiens of 2020’, Humankind offers a revolutionary new view of human nature: one that argues people are essentially good. Providing a new perspective on the last 200,000 years of human history, bestselling author and historian Rutger Bregman (Utopia for Realists) shows how believing in kindness and altruism can change our world. Rutger Bregman’s Utopia for Realists was translated into more than 30 languages, and his TED talk on the subject of poverty has been viewed more than three million times. He was recently ranked number 10 in the Big Issue’s Top 100 Changemakers of 2020. This talk was recorded at the online 5x15 event on 5th October 2020. Learn more about 5x15 events: 5x15stories.com Twitter: www.twitter.com/5x15stories Facebook: www.facebook.com/5x15stories Instagram: www.instagram.com/5x15stories

This is a story about birds and fathers. About the things that run in the blood; sanity and madness; captivity and freedom. Charlie Gilmour’s biological father was the poet, anarchist and magician Heathcote Williams, a man who kept a jackdaw in his stately home and vanished from Charlie’s life in the dead of night. Many years later, a young magpie fell into Charlie’s world and, in the midst of darkness, brought a new dawn. Charlie Gilmour lives in South London with his wife, Janina, and their daughter Olga. Featherhood has won praise from Neil Gaiman, Simon Amstell and Isabella Tree, and is Charlie’s first book. This talk was recorded at the online 5x15 event on 5th October 2020. Learn more about 5x15 events: 5x15stories.com Twitter: www.twitter.com/5x15stories Facebook: www.facebook.com/5x15stories Instagram: www.instagram.com/5x15stories

Dr Rangan Chatterjee is one of the most influential doctors in the UK and is changing the way that we look at illness. He is known for taking a 360 degree approach to health, which was highlighted in his ground-breaking BBC TV show, Doctor in the House, and in his first book The 4 Pillar Plan. He is the resident doctor on BBC One's Breakfast, a regular commentator on BBC Radio and hosts his own chart-topping podcast, Feel Better Live More. His new book is The Stress Solution, which proposes simple and achievable interventions to help you reset your body, mind, relationships and purpose, offering simple tools for how to cope with modern life. Recorded at The Tabernacle on the 21st January 2019. 5x15 brings together five outstanding individuals to tell of their lives, passions and inspirations. There are only two rules - no scripts and only 15 minutes each. Learn more about 5x15 events: 5x15stories.com Twitter: www.twitter.com/5x15stories Facebook: www.facebook.com/5x15stories Instagram: www.instagram.com/5

Covid-19 and Climate Change – Time for a reset? This opening session of the Earth Convention series explores the impact of the global pandemic on climate change and the environment and asks – is now the time for a reset? How has lockdown changed how we view the environment? Can we take the opportunity to turn the COVID-19 crisis into a defining moment in the fight against climate change? How can we reach for a healthier, more sustainable and greener way forward and what practical steps can we all take to create the future we want to see? Speakers: Christiana Figueres was the Executive Secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCC) 2010-2016 and the public face of the most pivotal climate agreement in history, the Paris Climate Agreement of 2015. Tom Rivett-Carnac was Christiana’s political strategist at the UN. James Thornton is the founding CEO of ClientEarth. Juliet Davenport is founder and Chief Executive Officer of Good Energy. Chaired by Rosie Boycott – cross bench peer

Laura Bates is the founder of the Everyday Sexism Project, an ever-increasing collection of over 100,000 testimonies of gender inequality, with branches in 25 countries worldwide. Laura writes regularly for the Guardian, Telegraph and the New York Times amongst others and won a British Press Award in 2015. She works closely with politicians, businesses, schools, police forces and organisations from the Council of Europe to the United Nations to tackle gender inequality. She was awarded a British Empire Medal for services to gender equality in the Queen's Birthday Honours list 2015 and has been named woman of the year by Cosmopolitan, Red Magazine and The Sunday Times Magazine. Laura is a contributor at Women Under Siege, a New York-based project tackling rape in conflict worldwide and she is patron of SARSAS, Somerset and Avon Rape and Sexual Abuse Support. She is the recipient of two honorary degrees, an honorary fellow of St John's College Cambridge and was awarded the Internet and Society Award by the O

Google the name “Lemn Sissay” and all the returning hits will be about him because there is only one Lemn Sissay in the world. Lemn Sissay is a BAFTA nominated award winning writer, international poet, performer playwright, artist and broadcaster. He has read on stage throughout the world: from The Library of Congress in The United States to The University of Addis Ababa, from Singapore to Sri Lanka, Bangalore to Dubai, from Bali to Greenland AND Wigan library. He was awarded an MBE for services to literature by The Queen of England. Along with Chimamanda Ngoze Adichie and Margaret Atwood he won a Pen Pinter Prize in 2019. He is Chancellor of The University of Manchester and an Honorary Doctor from The Universities of Huddersfield, Manchester, Kent and Brunei. He is Dr Dr Dr Dr Lemn Sissay. He was the first poet commissioned to write for the London Olympics and poet of the FA Cup. 5x15 brings together outstanding individuals to tell of their lives, passions and inspirations. Learn more about 5x15 events: w

Tim Harford is a behavioural economist, BBC radio and TV presenter and award-winning Financial Times columnist. He offers a distinctive blend of storytelling, humour and intelligence. The presenter of the BBC’s More or Less and Fifty Things That Made The Modern Economy, FT columnist, Oxford Fellow and million-selling business author is a compelling storyteller on economics, management, psychology and the unexpected bits in between. Books include The Undercover Economist and How to Make the World Add Up: Ten Rules for Thinking Differently About Numbers. 5x15 brings together outstanding individuals to tell of their lives, passions and inspirations. Learn more about 5x15 events: www.5x15stories.com Twitter: www.twitter.com/5x15stories Facebook: www.facebook.com/5x15stories Instagram: www.instagram.com/5x15stories

The Secret Barrister is a junior barrister specialising in criminal law, and the author of the award-winning blog of the same name. The Secret Barrister writes for many publications, including The Times, the Guardian, New Statesman, iNews, Esquire and Counsel magazine. In 2016 and 2017, the Secret Barrister was named Independent Blogger of the Year at the Editorial Intelligence Comment Awards. In 2018, the Secret Barrister was named Legal Personality of the Year at the Law Society Awards. Their first book, The Secret Barrister: Stories of the Law and How It’s Broken, was a Sunday Times number-one bestseller and has been in the top-ten bestseller list for more than a year. It won the Books Are My Bag Non-Fiction Award 2018, and was shortlisted for Waterstones Book of the Year and the Specsavers Non-Fiction Book of the Year 2018. 5x15 brings together outstanding individuals to tell of their lives, passions and inspirations. There are only two rules - no scripts and only 15 minutes each. Learn more about 5x1

Wade Davis is a writer, photographer, and filmmaker whose work has taken him from the Amazon to Tibet, Africa to Australia, Polynesia to the Arctic. Explorer-in-Residence at the National Geographic Society from 1999 to 2013, he is currently Professor of Anthropology and the BC Leadership Chair in Cultures and Ecosystems at Risk at the University of British Columbia. He will be talking about his captivating new book that brings vividly to life the story of the great Rio Magdalena, illuminating Colombia's complex past, present, and future. 5x15 brings together outstanding individuals to tell of their lives, passions and inspirations. There are only two rules - no scripts and only 15 minutes each. Learn more about 5x15 events: 5x15stories.com Twitter: www.twitter.com/5x15stories Facebook: www.facebook.com/5x15stories Instagram: www.instagram.com/5x15stories

Merlin Sheldrake is a biologist and a writer. He received a Ph.D. in Tropical Ecology from Cambridge University for his work on underground fungal networks in tropical forests in Panama, where he was a predoctoral research fellow of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute. He is a musician and keen fermenter. Entangled Life is his first book. 5x15 brings together outstanding individuals to tell of their lives, passions and inspirations. There are only two rules - no scripts and only 15 minutes each. Learn more about 5x15 events: 5x15stories.com Twitter: www.twitter.com/5x15stories Facebook: www.facebook.com/5x15stories Instagram: www.instagram.com/5x15stories

In this very special 5x15 Future of Food event, we cut through the confusion with Henry Dimbleby, Tim Spector, Dee Woods, Tasha Mhakayakora and Rosie Boycott. Tim Spector - Spoon-Fed: Why almost everything we've been told about food is wrong Tim Spector, author of the best-selling The Diet Myth, Professor of Genetic Epidemiology at King's College London, and expert in the gut and how we treat it. He'll draw on pioneering research into microbes, genetics and diet and talk about his new book, Spoon Fed, to reveal why almost everything we've been told about food is wrong. Dee Woods - Stories of food during the pandemic Dee Woods, award-winning cook and community food educator, who works on the front line in food banks, and will speak of her first-hand experience of the devastating impacts of the current crisis on many people's ability to access food. Henry Dimbleby - The National Food Strategy Henry Dimbleby, the co-founder of Leon restaurants, co-author of the School Food Plan and leading the National Food s

Join urban explorer Bradley Garrett and acclaimed author and academic Robert Macfarlane for a thrilling and timely discussion. Bradley Garrett is a geographer and urban explorer based at University College Dublin, and is ‘the world’s leading expert on survivalists’ (the Times). His work has been featured on Channel 4, ITV and the BBC. Garrett was a postdoctoral fellow at Wolfson College, Oxford, and has spoken at the Tate Modern and Barbican galleries, the Sydney Opera House and Google. He climbed London’s Shard before it was open to the public. Robert Macfarlane is a fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and the author of prize-winning and bestselling books about nature, place and people including Mountains of the Mind, The Old Ways and Underland, which won the 2019 Wainwright Prize and was shortlisted for the 2020 Orwell Prize for Political Writing. His work has been translated into many languages and adapted for film, television, radio, stage and music. In 2017 he was awarded the E.M. Forster Prize for

Lisa Taddeo’s Three Women is a world-wide sensation – forever changing how we think about women and desire. All Lina wanted was to be desired. How did she end up in a marriage with two children and a husband who wouldn’t touch her? All Maggie wanted was to be understood. How did she end up in a relationship with her teacher and then in court, a hated pariah in her small town? All Sloane wanted was to be admired. How did she end up a sexual object of men, including her husband, who liked to watch her have sex with other men and women?Nearly a decade in the making, Lisa Taddeo’s Three Women is a global phenomenon. Hailed instantly as a feminist classic, this staggering work of nonfiction is the result of thousands of hours spent in the company of its subjects – three women whose lives reveal profound and previously unspoken truths about life and love, womanhood and desire. ‘Three Women examines love and lust, instigation and exploitation, fairytales and infidelity, girlhood and womanhood and motherhood and all

Dr Adam Rutherford is a science writer and broadcaster. He studied genetics at University College London, and during his PhD on the developing eye, he was part of a team that identified the first genetic cause of a form of childhood blindness. He has written and presented many award-winning series and programmes for the BBC, including the flagship weekly BBC Radio 4 programme Inside Science and The Curious Cases of Rutherford & Fry with Dr Hannah Fry. He is the author of Creation, which was shortlisted for the Wellcome Trust Prize, A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived, The Book of Humans and How to Argue with a Racist. 5x15 brings together five outstanding individuals to tell of their lives, passions and inspirations. There are only two rules - no scripts and only 15 minutes each. This talk was recorded at the online 5x15 event on 5th August 2020. Learn more about 5x15 events: 5x15stories.com Twitter: www.twitter.com/5x15stories Facebook: www.facebook.com/5x15stories Instagram: www.instagram.com/5x15