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 ...
Jun 03, 2022•1 hr 9 min
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 ...
May 30, 2022•1 hr 8 min
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 whirlwin...
May 27, 2022•17 min
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 1...
May 23, 2022•8 min
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...
May 20, 2022•16 min
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 ...
May 16, 2022•13 min
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 la...
Apr 29, 2022•1 hr
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 afre...
Apr 25, 2022•1 hr 5 min
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 thr...
Apr 22, 2022•1 hr
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...
Apr 18, 2022•59 min
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 id...
Apr 15, 2022•14 min
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 G...
Apr 11, 2022•15 min
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 exploratio...
Apr 08, 2022•1 hr 4 min
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 9...
Apr 04, 2022•12 min
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 re...
Apr 01, 2022•13 min
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, 'Writ...
Mar 28, 2022•13 min
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 w...
Mar 25, 2022•13 min
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...
Feb 18, 2022•13 min
Paul Mendez is a London-based novelist, essayist and screenwriter. Born in 1982 and raised in the Black Country, the eldest of four children by Jehovah’s Witness parents of second-generation Jamaican heritage, Mendez disassociated himself from the Witnesses while still a teenager, before moving to Kent to study automotive engineering, then London to study acting, leaving both courses before the end of the first year. After reading James Baldwin’s 1968 novel Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone...
Feb 14, 2022•14 min
Ben Rawlence has written for publications including the Guardian, London Review of Books, New York Times, New York Times Book Review and the New Yorker. While working for Human Rights Watch in the Horn of Africa he became fascinated by the Dadaab refugee camp, which became the subject of his acclaimed 2016 book, City of Thorns. His new book, THE TREELINE, is a powerful and beautifully written blend of reportage, nature, travel and science writing. Telling the story of our changing climate throug...
Feb 11, 2022•16 min
Emma Gannon is a Sunday Times bestselling author, speaker, novelist and host of the award-winning creative careers podcast in the UK, Ctrl Alt Delete, which has reached almost 10 million downloads. She has blogged since 2009; podcasted since 2016 and is the author of five books, including her award-winning debut novel OLIVE. Her new book Disconnected will be published in January 2022 in the UK and US. 5x15 brings together five outstanding individuals to tell of their lives, passions and inspirat...
Feb 08, 2022•13 min
5x15 presents: Isabel Allende - novelist, feminist & philanthropist - in conversation about her new novel Violeta with journalist Alex Clark Isabel Allende is one of the most widely-read authors in the world, having sold more than 75 million books which have been translated into 42 languages. Join 5x15 for this exclusive launch event for her unmissable new novel Violeta. Allende won worldwide acclaim in 1982 with the publication of her first novel, The House of the Spirits. Since then, she h...
Feb 04, 2022•58 min
Honorée Fanonne Jeffers in conversation about her breath-taking debut novel, The Love Songs Of W.E.B Du Bois, which chronicles the journey of multiple generations of one American family, from the centuries of the colonial slave trade through the Civil War to our own tumultuous era. Set to be one of the most talked about books of the year, it was an instant New York Times top 10 bestseller and Oprah Book Club Choice, and has drawn comparisons to the work of Toni Morrison. She is is a fiction writ...
Feb 04, 2022•13 min
Huma Abedin often made the headlines as a long-time aide to Hillary Clinton during her years as First Lady, US Senator, presidential candidate, Secretary of State and Democratic Presidential Nominee. In her memoir Both/And, Huma tells her inspiring story coming of age as an American Muslim, the daughter of Indian and Pakistani scholars who split their time between Saudi Arabia, the United States and the UK. She also writes candidly about family, legacy, identity, faith, motherhood and her marria...
Feb 01, 2022•13 min
Michael Ignatieff is a Canadian writer, philosopher, historian, professor and former politician. His award-winning books have been translated into twelve languages, and in 2016 he was named a Member of the Order of Canada. Arriving at one of the darkest moments in recent times, ON CONSOLATION is an uplifting and deeply moving portrait of men and women across history who have found the courage to face their fates and continue, unafraid. Asking how we console each other - and ourselves - in an age...
Jan 28, 2022•12 min
Join 5x15 to hear bestselling author James Rebanks as he reflects on his prize-winning new book, English Pastoral; the countryside we’ve inherited, and the legacy we want to leave. James Rebanks is a shepherd based in the Lake District, where his family have lived and worked for over six hundred years. His No.1 bestselling debut, The Shepherd's Life, won the Lake District Book of the Year, was shortlisted for the Wainwright and Ondaatje prizes, and has been translated into sixteen languages. His...
Dec 23, 2021•1 hr 4 min
Best-selling and ground-breaking authors Emma Dabiri – What White People Can Do Next: From Allyship to Coalition – and Shon Faye - The Transgender Issue - discuss their work, our current divisions and how we can come together to tell a new story and unite seemingly disparate areas. In What White People Can Do Next, Emma Dabiri’s best-selling manifesto tackling our current discourse on race, she argues that we require “an understanding, not so much of an intersectionality of identities, but an in...
Dec 06, 2021•1 hr 1 min
Rationality matters. Steven Pinker discusses a user’s guide to rationality during an epidemic of unreason. Join 5x15 for an enlightening discussion between renowned experimental cognitive scientist Steven Pinker and behavioural economist, broadcaster and writer Tim Harford. In the twenty-first century, humanity is reaching new heights of scientific understanding - and at the same time appears to be losing its mind. How can a species that discovered vaccines for Covid-19 in less than a year produ...
Dec 03, 2021•57 min
Jay Rayner is an award-winning writer, broadcaster, author and jazz pianist. However he is best known - and beloved - as the restaurant critic of the Observer. His new book, Chewing the Fat, is a hilariously rollicking collection of his funniest columns, in which he also attempts to answer such pressing questions as ‘Does bacon improve everything?’ and ‘Is gin really the devil’s work?’. Hailed by Nigella Lawson as ‘Rayner at his rambunctious best: upfront, full fat, and always deliciously writte...
Nov 29, 2021•59 min
Raynor Winn's first book, The Salt Path, charted her extraordinary and uplifting journey around the South West Coastal Path, as she battled homelessness, financial uncertainty and her husband Moth’s terminal illness. The book spent 80 weeks in the Sunday Times best seller charts and has inspired millions with its tale of the healing power of nature, resilience and human endurance. She comes to 5x15 to talk about her new book, The Wild Silence, one couple’s inextricable connection to the land, an...
Nov 26, 2021•17 min
