5x15 and renowned nonprofit The Moth present a night of stories, inspired by the New York Times Bestselling book, How to Tell a Story: The Essential Guide to Memorable Storytelling from The Moth. Join us for an evening of true stories from two Moth speakers, storyteller interviews, and tips from some of the authors from the book, including Moth Directors Catherine Burns, Meg Bowles, and Kate Tellers. Hosted by poet, playwright, author, and Moth Storyteller Jon Goode. With thanks for your support...
Feb 03, 2023•1 hr 12 min
In January, the month of resolutions, join 5x15 to hear the acclaimed author Pico Iyer on how we might find paradise in the present. Paradise is a universal but elusive concept; a place we might spend our whole lives looking for. Moving between Iran, North Korea, the Dalai Lama’s Himalayas and the temples of Japan, Pico Iyer’s new book The Half Known Life: Finding Paradise in a Divided World reflects on ideas of utopia and ways of finding solace in these fractious times. Does religion lead us ba...
Jan 31, 2023•1 hr
Philip Lymbery is Chief Executive of leading international farm animal welfare organisation Compassion in World Farming, as well as being a Visiting Professor at the University of Winchester, award-winning author and animal advocate. His new book, SIXTY HARVESTS LEFT, takes its title from a chilling warning made by the United Nations that the world’s soils could be gone within a lifetime. Uncovering how the food industry and ‘Big Ag’ threatens our world, it also spotlights the pioneers who are b...
Dec 16, 2022•11 min
5x15 is thrilled to welcome best-selling writer and journalist Luke Harding to talk about his new book Invasion: Russia’s Bloody War and Ukraine’s Fight for Survival, a powerful and urgent account of the war in Ukraine. Reporting from Ukraine as foreign correspondent for the Guardian, Luke Harding has had unique insights into this conflict. Invasion, which is the first book of reportage from the front line, is a 'superb first draft of history' (Anne Applebaum) that examines the personal, religio...
Dec 13, 2022•59 min
Raynor Winn’s new memoir Landlines is a story that begins in fear but ends in hope. As the health of Moth, Raynor’s husband, declines, the couple set out to walk the gruelling, remote and stunningly beautiful terrain of Scotland’s Cape Wrath Trail, reflecting on community and the environment along the way. Raynor is the bestselling author of the astonishing, multi-award-winning The Salt Path (2019) which told the story of another remarkable journey, when nature first saved the couple. Just days ...
Dec 01, 2022•15 min
Colm Tóibín's new book, A Guest at the Feast, is a celebration of writing and brings together essays about growing up in Ireland during radical change; about cancer, priests, popes, homosexuality, and literature. He was born in Enniscorthy in 1955. He is the author of ten novels, and his work has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize three times, as well as the Folio Prize in 2015; and has won the Costa Novel Award, the Impac Award and the David Cohen Prize for Literature, amongst others. 5x15 b...
Nov 28, 2022•15 min
Gail Whiteman is an expert on global risk arising from the systemic changes occurring in the natural environment. She is Professor of Sustainability at the University of Exeter’s Business School and founder of Arctic Basecamp, a team of Arctic experts and scientists who, for the last five years, have brought their Arctic-based research to the World Economic Forum annual meeting at Davos. In so doing, their aim is to call for action from global leaders to apply responsive and responsible leadersh...
Nov 25, 2022•14 min
Join 5x15 online in November to hear acclaimed playwright and screenwriter Abi Morgan in conversation with beloved One Day author and screenwriter David Nicholls. THIS IS NOT A PITY MEMOIR is BAFTA and Emmy-award winner Abi Morgan’s extraordinary story, written in the wake of her partner’s devastating illness. When she found the man she had loved for nearly twenty years lying on the bathroom floor, it was clear that life for both of them would never be the same again. But this is not a pity memo...
Nov 08, 2022•1 hr
Sam Knight is a staff writer for the New Yorker, has won two Foreign Press Association awards and was shortlisted for the 2018 Orwell Prize for political writing. His 2017 Guardian Long Read on the events that will follow the death of the Queen, ‘London Bridge is Down’, was viewed four million times. In THE PREMONITIONS BUREAU, his first book, he reveals the strange, true and unsettling tale of a 1960s psychiatrist obsessed with investigating why some people seemed able to predict disaster. A st...
Nov 03, 2022•13 min
Lucy Siegle is a journalist, broadcaster and eco expert. She is the Observer and Guardian’s Ethical Living columnist, the BBC’s The One Show’s resident environmental expert, and set up the Observer Ethical Awards in 2005. In BE THE ULTIMATE FRIEND OF THE EARTH, she tackles ten big topics involved in our quest to reach net zero. She explores how every one of us can be an ally to the planet; how we can discover how our consumer habits and lifestyles really impact the environment – and how we can a...
Oct 31, 2022•14 min
Katy Hessel is an art historian, broadcaster and curator dedicated to celebrating women artists from all over the world. How many women artists do you know? Who makes art history? In her new book, THE STORY OF ART WITHOUT MEN, Katy Hessel challenges the canon as we know it and showcases the female and gender non-conformist artists who are so often excluded from the history books. Discover the glittering Sofonisba Anguissola of the Renaissance, the radical work of Harriet Powers in the nineteenth...
Oct 28, 2022•17 min
Join 5x15 for a thrilling investigation into whale science and animal communication with Tom Mustill, author of the ground-breaking new book How to Speak Whale and Lucy Jones author of Losing Eden. How could breakthroughs in science change our relationship with animals forever? In 2015, wildlife filmmaker Tom Mustill was whale watching when a humpback breached onto his kayak and nearly killed him. After a VIDEO CLIP of the event went viral, Tom found himself inundated with theories about what ha...
Oct 25, 2022•1 hr 1 min
Jack Parlett is a writer, poet and scholar specialising in queer studies and American literature. In FIRE ISLAND, he tells the story of a slim strip of land off the coast of New York that has become iconic as a place of hedonism, reinvention and liberation. A book full of literary intrigue – from the halcyon scenes of Frank O’Hara’s poetry to the bars where Patricia Highsmith got drunk – it moves from the island’s early life as a discreet home for same-sex love, via the post-Stonewall disco era ...
Oct 21, 2022•14 min
The hugely popular Jonathan Drori – writer and plant-lover – returns to 5x15 for a very special conversation with Professor Nicola Spence CBE, Defra’s Chief Plant Health Officer and the Head of the UK National Plant Protection Organisation. Both Jonathan and Nicola have been inspired in their love of plants by visits to Kew Gardens from a young age. In this event, they will explore how those early experiences led them both on journeys of discovery to the far reaches of the botanical universe. Jo...
Oct 17, 2022•1 hr 2 min
Join two of 5x15’s favourite guests, Carlo Rovelli and Oliver Burkeman, to discuss time, the universe and our place in it. Carlo Rovelli’s HELOGLAND was an instant bestseller when it was published in 2021, and was chosen as a book of the year by The Times, Financial Times, Sunday Times, Guardian and Prospect. To celebrate its paperback publication, we are delighted to welcome Carlo back to 5x15 to revisit this beautiful, thrilling and mind-bending journey into the world of quantum physics. In HE...
Sep 23, 2022•1 hr 1 min
5x15 is thrilled to welcome Robert Harris to our virtual stage for a conversation with 5x15 co-founder Rosie Boycott. Robert Harris is the author of fourteen bestselling novels: the Cicero Trilogy - Imperium, Lustrum and Dictator - Fatherland, Enigma, Archangel, Pompeii, The Ghost, The Fear Index, An Officer and a Spy, which won four prizes including the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction, Conclave, Munich, The Second Sleep and V2. Now he returns with a thrilling new novel, Act of Oblivio...
Sep 19, 2022•59 min
Join 5x15 in September to hear about acclaimed biographer Andrea Wulf’s thrilling, and timely, story of a group of friends who changed the world in conversation with broadcaster Kirsty Lang. In the 1790s an extraordinary group of friends from the small German town of Jena changed the world. They were the first Romantics, and their ideas transformed society and shaped the way we lead our lives today. In Magnificent Rebels, Andrea Wulf, the Costa Prize-winning author of The Invention of Nature, te...
Sep 06, 2022•1 hr
At a time of existential global challenges, we need our best brainpower. How do we create genius environments, help our brains flourish and boost group thinking? Neuroscientist and bestselling author of The Science of Fate Hannah Critchlow shows how two heads can be better than one in her ground-breaking new book Joined up Thinking. She joins 5x15 for a very special online event with Dr Rowan Williams, Honorary Professor of Contemporary Christian Thought in the University of Cambridge and former...
Sep 02, 2022•1 hr 1 min
A special 5x15 event with Chris Blackhurst- an acclaimed writer, commentator, former editor of The Independent and author of Too Big To Jail (Macmillan)- in conversation with investigative reporter Oliver Bullough, author of Butler to the World and Moneyland. El Chapo, the world’s number one drug baron, had a problem: he needed to launder the billions of dollars he netted from peddling drugs across the United States. Step forward, HSBC... Too Big to Jail : Inside HSBC, the Mexican drug cartels a...
Aug 02, 2022•1 hr 2 min
Join 5x15 to hear Karen Armstrong on her powerful new book Sacred Nature - an urgent manifesto and a practical guide on how to rekindle our spiritual bond with nature, drawing on the wisdom of the world's religious traditions. She’ll be in conversation with 5x15 co-founder Rosie Boycott. Armstrong is one of the world’s leading commentators on religious affairs. She spent seven years as a Roman Catholic nun before going on to become an acclaimed writer and broadcaster. In Sacred Nature, Armstrong...
Jul 29, 2022•1 hr 1 min
Join 5x15 for an online event with the acclaimed historian Sarah Churchwell in conversation with Today presenter Justin Webb to delve into American myth-making and denialism past and present. In THE WRATH TO COME: Gone with the Wind and the Lies America Tells, historian Sarah Churchwell uses one of the most enduringly popular stories of all time as a lens through which to examine the divisions ripping apart the United States today. Sarah will be joined in conversation by Justin Webb, the longest...
Jul 22, 2022•1 hr 3 min
Geoff Dyer is a ‘national treasure’ (Zadie Smith): the award-winning author of ten non-fiction books and four novels, including Out of Sheer Rage and Yoga for People Who Can’t be Bothered to Do It, which have been translated into 24 languages worldwide. He is currently Writer in Residence at the University of Southern California. In THE LAST DAYS OF ROGER FEDERER, he turns his attention to last things - the last days and last achievements of writers, painters, athletes and musicians from J.W Tur...
Jul 04, 2022•14 min
Jackie Morris is an author and illustrator. The Lost Words, which she wrote with Robert Macfarlane, won the 2019 Kate Greenaway Medal for distinguished illustration, and she was nominated for the same award in 2021 for The Unwinding, her ‘book for dreamers’. FEATHER, LEAF, BARK & STONE is a pillow book of more than 100 short poems and meditations, typed onto gold leaf, leaves, bark and feathers. Written in the wake of Morris’s father’s death, it grew out of her grief, and was guided by her d...
Jul 01, 2022•14 min
Jonathan Freedland is an award-winning Guardian columnist, presenter of BBC Radio Four’s The Long View, and a multi-million selling thriller author under the name Sam Bourne. His new book, THE ESCAPE ARTIST, marks a return to non-fiction, telling the story of Rudolf Vrba, ‘the man who broke out of Auschwitz to warn the world’. Vrba’s testimony would reach Roosevelt, Churchill and the pope, and eventually save over 200,000 lives, but the escape from Auschwitz was not his last. After the war, he k...
Jun 27, 2022•14 min
Leila Mottley has been hailed as ‘the voice of a generation’. An acclaimed youth poet, her first novel, NIGHTCRAWLING, was bought in a thirteen-way auction in the States, a nine-way auction in the UK and has already sold into eight languages. Inspired by a true scandal underpinning the police department in Oakland, California, Mottley’s home town, it is an unforgettable novel about young people navigating the darkest corners of an adult world, told with a humanity that is at once agonising and u...
Jun 24, 2022•14 min
Philosopher Amia Srinivasan, bestselling author of The Right to Sex, in conversation with the author of Three Women, Lisa Taddeo. '[This] ambitious, magisterial work stands out in the ongoing tide of dull, girl boss feminism arguing for personal empowerment over collective liberation . . . In a world of easy, one-dimensional answers, [Srinivasan] is unquestionably the real deal' – Vogue Amia Srinivasan is the author of one of the most talked about books in recent times, The Right to Sex, which i...
Jun 20, 2022•1 hr
William Atkins’s third book, EXILES, tells the story of three nineteenth-century dissidents whose lives were profoundly shaped by the winds of empire, nationalism and autocracy that continue to blow today. A masterpiece of storytelling, travel writing and imaginative empathy, it is a book about displacement, colonialism and what it means to have a home. The Moor, William’s first book, was shortlisted for the Wainwright Prize; his second, The Immeasurable World, won the Stanford Dolman Travel Wri...
Jun 17, 2022•15 min
The Secret Barrister is a junior barrister specialising in criminal law. Their first book, The Secret Barrister, won a number of awards and has been in the top ten bestsellers for more than a year; their second, Fake Law, was also an instant bestseller. In NOTHING BUT THE TRUTH, the Secret Barrister reveals their personal story, charting their journey to the Bar and lifting the lid on life inside the Inns of Court. They also describe their transformation into a campaigner for reform, intent on e...
Jun 13, 2022•14 min
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 ...
Jun 10, 2022•13 min
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 (nomi...
Jun 06, 2022•15 min
