5x15

Lea Ypi’s memoir of growing up in communist Albania, FREE, is an unforgettable coming-of-age story exploring the meaning of freedom in all its forms. It was hailed by Phillipe Sands as ‘a lyrical memoir, of deep and affecting power, of the sweet smell of humanity mingled with flesh, blood and hope’ and was shortlisted for the 2021 Costa Biography Award and the 2021 Baille Gifford Prize. Lea Ypi is Professor of Political Theory at the London School of Economics, and Political Science and Adjunct Professor in Philosophy at the Australian National University. She speaks six languages and lives in London. With thanks for your support for 5x15 online5x15 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

Luke Harding returns to 5x15 to discuss Ukraine, Russia, Putin and what happens next. Luke is an award-winning foreign correspondent with the Guardian and a #1 New York Times bestselling author. Between 2007 and 2011 he was the Guardian's Moscow bureau chief; the Kremlin expelled him from the country in the first case of its kind since the cold war. He is the author of Collusion, A Very Expensive Poison, The Snowden Files, and Mafia State, as well as the co-author of WikiLeaks and The Liar (nominated for the Orwell Prize). Two of Harding's books – The Fifth Estate and Snowden – have been made into films. With thanks for your support for 5x15 online5x15 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

Join 5x15 for an unmissable live event back at The Tabernacle in London's Notting Hill with the wildly entertaining John Crace, parliamentary sketch writer and political satirist par excellence, in conversation with the one and only Viv Groskop. Throughout another year of bluster and bedlam in Westminster, John’s brilliantly acerbic political sketches have once more provided the nation with a much-needed injection of humour. In A Farewell to Calm: The New Normal Survival Guide, Crace introduces an infectiously funny selection of his finest pieces from 2020–21, taking in everything from a summer of unfathomable U-turns to Christmas Covid confusion, and from lockdown-lifting to Brexit blithering. Led by Boris’s poundshop Churchill tribute act, and featuring a cast of everyone’s least favourite pantomime villains, from Classic Dom Cummings to Door Matt Hancock, the end result is a brilliantly entertaining chronicle of another tumultuous year on these benighted islands. John Crace is the Guardian's parliament

A special online event with musician and visual artist Brian Eno and writer and artist James Bridle on AI, non-human intelligence, ecology, biological computing, more-than-human relations, and much more. James Bridle's new ground-breaking book is Ways of Being, which considers the fascinating, uncanny and multiple ways of existing on earth. What can we learn from these other forms of intelligence and personhood, and how can we change our societies to live more equitably with one another and the non-human world? Recent years have seen rapid advances in 'artificial' intelligence, which increasingly appears to be something stranger than we ever imagined. At the same time, we are becoming more aware of the other intelligences which have been with us all along, unrecognised. These other beings are the animals, plants, and natural systems that surround us, and are slowly revealing their complexity and knowledge - just as the new technologies we've built are threatening to cause their extinction, and ours. From

Delia Ephron is a bestselling author, screenwriter and playwright, whose movies include You’ve Got Mail, The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, Hanging Up and Michael. She collaborated with sister, Nora Ephron, on a play - Love, Loss and What I Wore - which ran for two years off-Broadway. In her new memoir, LEFT ON TENTH, she tells the story of how, in her seventies and recently widowed, she fell in love with a man she’d dated in college. But at the same time that she was embarking on a whirlwind romance, she discovered she was seriously ill. ‘Tender, witty and romantic’ - Emma Gannon. 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/5x15stories

Elif Shafak is an award winning Turkish British writer, and the Booker Prize-shortlisted author of nineteen books, which have been translated into 55 languages. Her novel 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in this Strange World was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and The Forty Rules of Love, was chosen by the BBC as one of '100 Novels That Shaped Our World'. Her latest novel is the bestselling THE ISLAND OF MISSING TREES, which was this month long-listed for the Women’s Prize for Fiction. Set in Cyprus in 1974 it tells the story of two teenagers - one Turkish and Muslim, the other Greek and Christian - who become lovers, while exploring themes of belonging and identity, love and trauma, nature and renewal.

Howard Jacobson has written sixteen novels and five works of non-fiction. He has twice won the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Award for comic fiction, and in 2010 he won the Man Booker Prize for The Finkler Question. Published in the year of his 80th birthday, his new memoir, MOTHER’S BOY, is an exploration of being an insider and outsider, both English and Jewish. It is also a record of a writer’s beginnings - a story of learning to understand who you are before you can become the writer you were meant to be. 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/5x15stories

Julia Samuel, MBE, is a leading British psychotherapist and the author of the bestsellers This Too Shall Pass and Grief Works. She is Founder Patron of Child Bereavement UK and a Vice President of the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy; she has also presented the podcasts A Living Loss and Grief Works. In EVERY FAMILY HAS A STORY, she presents eight beautifully drawn case studies and analyses a range of common issues, from separation and step-relationships to leaving home and loss. A moving and reassuring meditation that shows how much is passed from one generation to the next - and how this inheritance can be faced together. 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/5x15stories

Patrick Radden Keefe discusses Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty in conversation with Rosie Boycott. Empire of Pain is a sweeping investigative chronicle of three generations of the Sackler family, whose fortune was built by Valium and whose reputation was destroyed by OxyContin. The Sackler name adorns the walls of many storied institutions – Harvard; the Metropolitan Museum of Art; Oxford; the Louvre. They are one of the richest families in the world, known for their lavish donations in the arts and the sciences. The source of the family fortune was vague, however, until it emerged that the Sacklers were responsible for making and marketing Oxycontin, a blockbuster painkiller that was a catalyst for the opioid crisis – an international epidemic of drug addiction which has killed nearly half a million people. In his masterpiece of narrative reporting and writing, award-winning journalist and host of the Wind of Change podcast Patrick Radden Keefe exhaustively documents the jaw-d

5x15 welcomes 2021 Booker Prize-winning author Damon Galgut for a very special online event to celebrate the paperback launch of his sensational novel The Promise. A modern family saga that could only have come from South Africa, The Promise is a powerful story of a family in crisis. The judges of the Booker Prize heralded it as 'a strong, unambiguous commentary on the history of South Africa and of humanity itself' and 'a spectacular demonstration of how the novel can make us see and think afresh', likening Galgut’s writing to the work of William Faulkner and Virginia Woolf. The Promise is an epic drama that unfurls against the unrelenting march of national history. On a farm outside Pretoria, the Swarts are gathering for Ma’s funeral. The younger generation, Anton and Amor, detest everything the family stand for – not least their treatment of the Black woman who has worked for them her whole life. Salome was to be given her own house, her own land… yet somehow, that vow is carefully ignored. As each de

5x15 with Amitav Ghosh and Rosie Boycott as they discuss his ground breaking new book The Nutmeg's Curse. In 1621, Dutch East India Soldiers went on a genocidal rampage in The Banda islands, a tiny archipelago which produced the world’s entire supply of valuable nutmeg. In the fate of these islanders - massacred for a tree – Amitav Ghosh sees that moment when man began ‘muting and subduing the earth’. It was nothing less than the origin of our contemporary climate crisis. Tracing the current threats to our future to this moment, the best-selling author of The Ibis Trilogy and other novels, argues that the dynamics of climate change are rooted in a centuries-old geopolitical order constructed by Western colonialism. The story of the nutmeg becomes a parable revealing the ways human history has always been entangled with earthly materials – spices, tea, sugarcane, opium, and fossil fuels. Our crisis, Ghosh shows, is ultimately the result of a mechanistic view of the earth, where nature exists only as a

The Instant is the outstanding new book from Amy Liptrot, Sunday Times bestselling author of The Outrun. She joins us on the eve of publication for a very special event in conversation with Lucy Jones, author of Losing Eden. The Outrun is a book about living on the edge, about the pull between island and city, and about the ability of the sea, the land, the wind and the moon to restore life and renew hope. It won both the Wainwright Prize and the PEN Ackerley Prize, and was a BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week. Oscar nominee Saoirse Ronan has just been confirmed in the leading role in the forthcoming film adaptation. The Instant picks up where The Outrun left off. Wishing to leave the quiet isolation of her life on Orkney, Amy books a one-way flight to Berlin, rents a shared flat and looks for work. Searching for new experiences, she explores the city’s streets, nightclubs and parks and seeks out the city's wildlife - goshawks, raccoons and hooded crows. And she looks for love through the screen of her laptop.

Justin Webb is the longest serving presenter of BBC Radio 4’s flagship news and current affairs programme ‘Today.’ In THE GIFT OF A RADIO, he describes coming of age in the 1970s, his troubled home life and his experiences at a Quaker boarding school overseen by gun-wielding masters. With its tumultuous backdrop of strikes and IRA bombings, his candid and moving memoir probes familial and national dysfunction, at a time when attitudes to mental illness and masculinty were worlds away from our ideas today. 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/5x15stories

Clover Stroud is a journalist and the award-nominated author of books including the Sunday Times bestselling My Wild and Sleepless Nights. In The Red of My Blood, she recalls how her sister Nell Gifford, founder of Gifford’s circus, died of breast cancer at just 46. Days before, Nell had been given years to live. This raw, lyrical and ultimately hopeful memoir examines how death, once embraced, can exist alongside us, and even enrich our daily lives. It has already drawn acclaim from Elizabeth Gilbert, Lisa Taddeo and Juliet Nicholson among others. 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/5x15stories

Why have we lost our ability to focus? What are the causes? And, most importantly, how do we get it back? Join 5x15 to hear about Johann Hari's journey to the heart of this problem and the solutions he found along the way in conversation with the one and only Stephen Fry. Crucially, they will talk about how – as individuals, and as a society – we can get our focus back, if we are determined to fight for it. Stephen Fry has described Stolen Focus as "a beautifully researched and argued exploration of the breakdown of humankind's ability to pay attention." Johann Hari is the author of two New York Times best-selling books: Chasing the Scream: the First and Last Days of the War on Drugs and Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression - and the Unexpected Solutions. His books are being developed for film and television, have been translated into 28 languages and have received praise from a very broad range of people including Oprah, Hillary Clinton, Tucker Carlson, Elton John, Naomi Klein and G

Hannah Lowe's third full collection of poems, The Kids, won the 2021 Costa Poetry Award and went on to be named Costa Book of the Year, and was also shortlisted for the 2021 T.S. Eliot Prize. Hannah taught for a decade in an inner-city London sixth form. At the heart of her award-winning book of compassionate and energetic sonnets are fictionalised portraits of ‘The Kids’, the students she nurtured. But the poems go further, meeting her own child self as she comes of age in the riotous 80s and 90s, later bearing witness to her small son learning to negotiate contemporary London. Lowe interrogates the acts of teaching and learning with empathy and humour, exploring the universal experience of what it is to be taught, to learn and to teach. 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.co

Kate Humble joins us to talk about her debut cook book Home Cooked: Recipes From The Farm. After the huge success of the documentary series 'Escape To The Farm With Kate Humble', this is a celebration of simple, seasonal home cooking full of flavour, comfort and joy, with more than 100 recipes from the kitchen table, inspired by her rural life at home in Wales. Kate Humble is a writer, smallholder, campaigner and one of the UK’s best-known TV presenters. She started her television career as a researcher, later presenting programmes such as ‘Animal Park’, ‘Springwatch’ and ‘Autumnwatch’, ‘Lambing Live’, ‘Living with Nomads’, ‘Extreme Wives’, ‘Back to the Land’, ‘A Country Life for Half the Price’ and ‘Escape to the Farm’. Her other books include Friend for Life, Humble by Nature, A Year of Living Simply and Thinking on My Feet. 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 5

Monica Ali’s new novel, Love Marriage, is her first in a decade. Funny and poignant, sharp and sympathetic, it is a tour de force of storytelling that has won rave reviews. Centring on two young, engaged-to-be-married medics, Yasmin Ghorami and Joe Sangster, it is a clash of cultures story that explores who we are, how we love and how we can come to understand one another in today’s Britain. Monica Ali is the author of four previous novels including the Booker Prize shortlisted Brick Lane, 'Written with a wisdom and skill that few authors attain in a lifetime' (Sunday Times). 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/5x15stories

Osman Yousefzada is a celebrated multi-disciplinary artist whose global fashion label is worn by celebrities including Beyoncé, Lupita Nyong’o, Thandiwe Newton, Gwen Stefani, Emma Watson and Freida Pinto. In The Go-Between, his coming-of–age memoir, he describes his upbringing amidst a conservative Pakistani/Afghan Pashtun community. Living in the red-light district of central Birmingham, he had to balance Western school teachings with cultural traditions, weaving between worlds and struggling with the dual burdens of racism and community expectations. Osman has exhibited at the Victoria & Albert Museum, Design Museum London, Ringling Museum in Florida and Cincinnati Art Museum in Ohio. 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/5x15storie

Angela Saini is an independent British science journalist and the author of three books. She presents radio and television programmes on the BBC and her writing has appeared in The Sunday Times, Nature, New Scientist, National Geographic and Wired. She has won a number of national and international journalism awards. She has also been a judge for the Orwell Prize for non-fiction. Her latest book, Superior: The Return of Race Science, was published in 2019 to widespread critical acclaim and named a book of the year by the Financial Times, Guardian, The Telegraph and Sunday Times. Her previous book, Inferior: How Science Got Women Wrong, has been translated into thirteen languages. Both are on university reading lists across the world. 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/5x1