Medicine Unboxed

Described by Le Monde as ‘As fine an actor as she is a singer’ (Eliza Doolittle, My Fair Lady, Theatre du Chatelet), Sarah Gabriel is a singer, writer, and actor with a passion for creating work with artists of all disciplines. Arthur Jeffes founded Penguin Cafe in 2009, bringing together a talented and disparate group of musicians initially to perform his father Simon Jeffes’ legacy of world renowned PCO music, ten years after his untimely death in 1997.

Helen Gordon's books include Notes from Deep Time (Profile), Landfall (Penguin) and, with Travis Elborough, Being a Writer (Frances Lincoln). She has written about nature, science, clothes and books for various newspapers and magazines including the Economist's 1843 magazine, the Guardian and Wired UK, and is a former Granta magazine editor.

Born and raised in UK, Gurdain Rayatt is one of the leading tabla players and teachers in UK and Europe performing internationally with renowned Indian Classical musicians as well as world/crossover and fusion projects spanning several genres.

"What makes the difference between being conscious at all and being a chunk of living meat, or lifeless silicon, without any inner universe?" Anil Seth is a neuroscientist, author, and public speaker who has pioneered research into the brain basis of consciousness for more than twenty years.

"In an aimless universe the emergence of compassion is an evolutionary miracle, a shock as remarkable as the sudden jump into life." Richard Holloway is a Scottish writer and broadcaster, and was formerly bishop of Edinburgh in the Scottish Episcopal church.

"One of the pods hangs low, right next to Leon’s face. Inside are five tiny black seeds, smaller than his little fingernail. He picks one out and holds it up to the sun." Kit de Waal was born in Birmingham to an Irish mother, who was a childminder and foster carer and a Caribbean father. She worked for fifteen years in criminal and family law, was a magistrate for several years and sits on adoption panels. She used to advise Social Services on the care of foster children, and has written training manuals on adoption, foster care and judgecraft for members of the judiciary. Her writing has received numerous awards including the Bridport Flash Fiction Prize 2014 and 2015 and the SI Leeds Literary Reader's Choice Prize 2014 and the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year. MY NAME IS LEON, her first novel was published in 2016 and shortlisted for the Costa Book Award.

Arthur Jeffes founded Penguin Cafe in 2009, bringing together a talented and disparate group of musicians initially to perform his father Simon Jeffes’ legacy of world renowned PCO music, ten years after his untimely death in 1997. Arthur, a talented composer in his own right, quickly began to create new and unique genre-defying music, with the spellbinding philosophy of the Penguin Cafe always in his mind.

"We have searched for correspondence between the heavens and the Earth and between nature and the human body. " Stephen Ellcock is a renowned image collector whose online “cabinet of curiosities”—an ever-expanding, virtual museum of art that is open to all via social media—has attracted more than 633,000 followers worldwide. His most recent book, Underworlds: A Compelling Journey Through Subterranean Realms, Real and Imagined, was published in the United Kingdom, United States, France, Italy, Germany, and Spain. He is also the author of The Cosmic Dance: Finding Patterns and Pathways in a Chaotic Universe.

Chamkaur Ghag is an astroparticle physicist working in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at UCL. Chamkaur received his PhD from the University of Edinburgh in 2006 following his work on novel technologies to detect dark matter. He held post-doctoral positions at the University of Edinburgh and University of California Los Angeles, continuing his dark matter research and contributing to the world-leading experiments, before moving back to the UK in 2012 to initiate experimental dark matter research at UCL.

"I’ve always said there are no mysteries, only things we don’t know; but lately, I’ve thought not even knowledge takes all strangeness from the world." Sarah Perry is the internationally best selling author of the novels Melmoth, The Essex Serpent, and After Me Comes the Flood, and the non-fiction Essex Girls. She is a winner of the Waterstone's Book of the Year Awards and the British Book Awards, and has been nominated for major literary prizes including the Women's Prize for Fiction, the Dylan Thomas Prize, the Folio Prize and the Costa Novel Award.

“For months or years, bodies are pressed into bodies, lives dependent on other lives. You become cargo, a piece of meat, a being that loses humanity.” Sally Hayden is an award-winning journalist and photographer currently focused on migration, conflict and humanitarian crises. She has worked with VICE, VICE News, CNN International, the Financial Times Magazine, TIME, the Thomson Reuters Foundation, BBC, and the Washington Post amongst many others.

Nick Lane is Professor of Evolutionary Biochemistry in the Department of Genetics, Evolution and Environment at University College London. He is the author of five acclaimed books on evolutionary biochemistry, which have sold more than 150,000 copies worldwide, and been translated into 25 languages.

"The meteorite provided us with a window into the past, how simple chemistry kick started the origin of life at the birth of our solar system." Queenie Chan is a planetary scientist and a meteoriticist. Chan is currently a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) at the Department of Earth Sciences of the Royal Holloway University of London in the United Kingdom. Her research focuses on understanding the earliest chemical reactions involving liquid water in the solar system, and how the individual events turned simple life’s building blocks into increasingly complex molecules that ultimately yielded life. Her work typically involves the analysis of the chemical and organic contents of astromaterials including meteorites and asteroidal/cometary samples returned by space missions.

"It is neither a wholly mechanistic nor a wholly metaphysical question. Yet it remains for many patients a deeply important one: What is this disease doing to me?" Richard Horton qualified in physiology and medicine with honours from the University of Birmingham in 1986. He joined The Lancet in 1990, moving to New York as North American Editor in 1993. In 2020, he published The COVID-19 Catastrophe: What’s Gone Wrong and How to Stop It Happening Again.

"Who am I? Everybody. Individuals within that multitude are always flickering on and off within me, stepping forward, then receding." George Saunders is the author of nine books, including the novel Lincoln in the Bardo, which won the Man Booker Prize, and the story collections Pastoralia and Tenth of December, which was a finalist for the National Book Award. He has received fellowships from the Lannan Foundation, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Guggenheim Foundation. In 2006 he was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship. In 2013 he was awarded the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction and was included in Time’s list of the one hundred most influential people in the world. He teaches in the creative writing program at Syracuse University.

"Dear friends, would you look, only look. For love, allied to attention, will be urgently needed in the years to come." Katherine Rundell is the author of Rooftoppers, Cartwheeling in Thunderstorms (a Boston Globe–Horn Book Award winner), The Wolf Wilder, The Explorer, The Good Thieves, and The Zebra’s Great Escape. She grew up in Zimbabwe, Brussels, and London, and is currently a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford.

Max Porter worked as a bookseller at Daunt Books and was later editorial director of Granta and Portobello Books. In 2015, he published his first novel, Grief Is the Thing With Feathers, which won several awards including the Sunday Times/Peters Fraser and Dunlop young writer of the year and the Dylan Thomas prize. It was later adapted into a play directed by Enda Walsh. His second book, Lanny, was shortlisted for the Gordon Burn prize in 2019 and is being adapted into a film starring Rachel Weisz. Shy, his latest novel, was published by Faber in 2023.

Hayley Campbell is an author, broadcaster, and journalist. Her work has appeared in WIRED, The Guardian, New Statesman, Empire, GQ, and more. Her books include All the Living and the Dead and The Art of Neil Gaiman.

"The plastic bonding the metals together is polyethylene. It is literally solid petrol and will burn like it. This is what was starting to happen at Grenfell Tower." Peter Apps is an award-winning journalist and Deputy Editor at Inside Housing. He broke a story on the dangers of combustible cladding thirty-four days before the Grenfell Fire. He has not stopped reporting on this national tragedy since, and his coverage of the public inquiry has received widespread acclaim. He lives in London.

"In the owl-light, / when loneliness shines / through your bones like a bare bulb." Liz Berry is an award-winning poet from the Black Country and the author of The Patron Saint of Schoolgirls, Black Country and The Republic of Motherhood. Zaffar Kunial was born in Birmingham and lives in Hebden Bridge. He published a pamphlet in the Faber New Poets series in 2014 and spent that year as the Wordsworth Trust Poet-in-Residence. Since his first public reading, of 'Hill Speak' at the 2011 National Poetry Competition awards, he has spoken at various literature festivals and in programmes for BBC radio, and won the Geoffrey Dearmer Prize for his poem 'The Word'.