The Six Ideas to Change the World series, in partnership with Keystone Positive Change Investment Trust, continues in July with Gaia Vince on Migration. Migration is one of the most underreported consequences of the climate crisis, but it is also one of the most seismic. Put simply, the changing temperatures on our planet will force us to change where - and how - we live. What will the ongoing climate upheaval mean practically? How can we prepare for mass migration, and who will be the most affe...
Sep 14, 2023•1 hr 2 min
In July, 5x15 is thrilled to welcome the highly acclaimed and best-selling authors Polly Morland and Rachel Clarke, for a vital conversation about medicine, the NHS and the fascinating story behind Morland's new book A FORTUNATE WOMAN: A Country Doctor's Story, a Sunday Times bestseller that was shortlisted for the 2022 Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction. Polly Morland was clearing her late mother’s house when she found a battered paperback fallen behind the family bookshelf. Opening it, she ...
Sep 11, 2023•1 hr 2 min
If you were going to do just one thing to transform your health, what would it be? With the sheer amount of information we consume daily about diet, fitness and wellbeing, this can be an increasingly difficult question to answer. But Dr Michael Mosley, No.1 international best-selling author of the 5:2 diet books, is here to help. We are delighted to welcome him to 5x15's virtual stage for an energizing conversation about small changes that make all the difference, with cook, writer and presenter...
Sep 07, 2023•1 hr
The Six Ideas to Change the World series, in partnership with Keystone Positive Change Investment Trust, continues in June with Tim Smedley and Alok Jha on Water. Water scarcity is an urgent problem. While some of the world's water crisis can be attributed to changes wrought by climate change, like droughts and floods, there is also a long history of human mismanagement. What can we learn from past mistakes, and how will those lessons inform the future? In his new book The Last Drop: Solving the...
Jul 20, 2023•56 min
5x15 is delighted to welcome two best-selling and award-winning authors back to our virtual stage. This time, Lucy Jones and Amy Liptrot will be in conversation about Jones's highly anticipated new book MATRESCENCE: On the Metamorphosis of Pregnancy, Childbirth and Early Motherhood. Other than adolescence, there is no other time in a human's life course that entails such dramatic change than pregnancy, childbirth and early motherhood. So why has this transformation been so neglected by science, ...
Jul 17, 2023•1 hr
Dr Janina Ramirez is an Oxford lecturer, BBC broadcaster, researcher and author. She has presented and written over 30 hours of BBC history documentaries and series on TV and radio, and written five books for children and adults. Her new book Femina offers a ground-breaking reappraisal of medieval history. It reveals why women were struck from our historical narrative, restoring them to their rightful positions as the power-players who shaped the world we live in today.
Jul 13, 2023•19 min
Jeffrey Boakye is an author, broadcaster, educator and journalist with a particular interest in issues surrounding race, masculinity, education and popular culture. Originally from Brixton in London, Jeffrey has taught secondary English for fifteen years. He is the author of several books: Hold Tight: Black Masculinity, Millennials and the Meaning of Grime; Black, Listed: Black British Culture Explored; What is Masculinity? Why Does it Matter? And Other Big Questions; Musical Truth: A Musical Jo...
Jul 11, 2023•17 min
Mark Vanhoenacker is a commercial airline pilot for British Airways and the author of the international bestseller Skyfaring: A Journey with a Pilot and How to Land a Plane. A columnist for the Financial Times and a regular contributor to The New York Times, he has also written for The Times, The Atlantic, Wired and the Los Angeles Times. Born in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, Mark trained as a historian and worked as a management consultant before starting his flight training in Britain in 2001. He...
Jul 09, 2023•14 min
Jennifer Robinson is a barrister at Doughty Street Chambers in London. She has acted in key human rights and media freedom cases in domestic and international courts. Jennifer has advised survivors, journalists, media organisations, advocacy and frontline services organisations on free speech and media law issues. Jennifer serves on the boards of the Bonavero Human Rights Institute, the Bureau for Investigative Journalism and the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights. Dr Keina Yosh...
Jul 07, 2023•15 min
Lewis Dartnell is an astrobiology researcher and professor at the University of Westminster, and also an Honorary Research Associate at University College London (UCL). He is the author of the bestselling books The Knowledge: How to Rebuild Our World from Scratch and Origins: How the Earth Shaped Human History, which has been translated into 26 languages. He writes for the Guardian, The Times and New Scientist. Copies of The Knowledge exist on the surface of the Moon, and in the Svalbard Global ...
Jul 05, 2023•15 min
Andrew Motion was UK Poet Laureate from 1999 to 2009, is co-founder of the online Poetry Archive, and has written acclaimed biographies of Philip Larkin and John Keats among others. His memoir of childhood, In the Blood, was published in 2006, and its sequel, Sleeping on Islands: A Life in Poetry, appeared alongside Selected Poems: 1977 – 2022 in 2023. He is Homewood Professor in the Arts at Johns Hopkins University, and lives in Baltimore. With thanks for your support for 5x15 online! Learn mor...
Jun 09, 2023•19 min
Angela Saini is an award-winning journalist and author. She presents radio, podcasts, and television programmes, and her writing has appeared across the world, including in The Financial Times, Wired, and National Geographic. Angela's 2019 book Superior: The Return of Race Science was published to enormous critical acclaim, and became a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize, the Hughes Prize, and the Foyles Book of the Year. Inferior: How Science Got Women Wrong was published in 2017, and has bee...
Jun 06, 2023•13 min
Described as the Agatha Christie of the adoption world, Ariel Bruce works on ITV’s Long Lost Family and specialises in finding people affected by adoption, using her unique skills as a social worker and her background in care to reunite families all over the world. Born in London, Ariel’s parents were Jewish refugees and at the age of 12, she was placed into care and went on to have 6 different foster parents. Based in London, Ariel carries out extensive work in England, Scotland, Ireland and Wa...
Jun 02, 2023•16 min
The Six Ideas to Change the World series, in partnership with Keystone Positive Change Investment Trust, launches in May with Henry Dimbleby on Food. The co-founder of LEON restaurant chain and author of the National Food Strategy, Dimbleby is a leading voice on how the food we eat affects of our own health and the health of the planet. His new book Ravenous: How to Get Ourselves and Our Planet Into Shape (with Jemima Lewis), was named a Sunday Times best-seller upon its publication in March, an...
May 31, 2023•1 hr
Dr Tom Moorhouse is a conservation research scientist who has worked for twenty years at the Wildlife Conservation Research Unit, part of Oxford University's Biology Department. His work has focussed on the conservation ecology of water voles, the management of signal crayfish, hedgehog conservation and the impacts of wildlife tourism. He is the author of Elegy for a River and also award-winning children's fiction. His latest book is Ghosts in the Hedgerow: A Hedgehog Whodunnit. He lives with hi...
May 30, 2023•13 min
Dr Anne-Marie Imafidon MBE is a prodigy in every sense of the word. Aged 11, she was the youngest girl ever to pass A-level computing, and was just 20 years old when she received her Master’s Degree in Mathematics and Computer Science from the University of Oxford. Since then, she has forged an enviable CV, including positions at Goldman Sachs, Hewlett-Packard and Deutsche Bank. Then there are the Honorary Doctorates from Open University, Glasgow Caledonian University, Kent University, Bristol U...
May 28, 2023•10 min
5x15 is delighted to announce a new series of events in collaboration with Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. From spring into summer, we will host a range of expert writers, thinkers and scientists from Kew. They will reflect on what we must do to prevent biodiversity loss and protect life on Earth, and address some of the most important questions of our time. The series kicks off in April with a panel about Foods of the Future. From the benefits of no-dig gardening and new crop techniques, to the ver...
May 11, 2023•1 hr 3 min
Blake Morrison is a poet, novelist and journalist. His non-fiction books include And When Did You Last See Your Father? (1993), which won the J. R. Ackerley Prize and the Esquire/Volvo/Waterstone's Non-Fiction Book Award, As If (1997), about the murder of the toddler James Bulger in Liverpool in 1993, and a memoir of his mother, Things My Mother Never Told Me (2002). His poetry includes the collections Dark Glasses (1984), winner of a Somerset Maugham Award, and Shingle Street (2015). He is a re...
Apr 03, 2023•13 min
Julie McDowall is a freelance journalist and book critic specialising in the nuclear threat. Her writing has appeared in The Times, Economist, Spectator, Guardian, TLS, Prospect and Independent, and she is also the host of the Atomic Hobo podcast in which she reveals findings in the nuclear archives and reports on her travels to nuclear bunkers and other Cold War sites. Her book Attack Warning Red! How Britain Prepared for Nuclear War, is the first book to tell the story of day-to-day life on th...
Mar 30, 2023•14 min
Tania Branigan is a Guardian foreign leader writer. Having spent seven years as the Guardian’s China correspondent, she has also written for the Washington Post and The Australian. Her first book, Red Memory: Living, Remembering and Forgetting China's Culture Revolution, explores how the revolution has shaped China today, and uncovers forty years of silence through the rarely heard stories of individuals who lived through Mao's decade of madness. 5x15 brings together five outstanding individuals...
Mar 27, 2023•13 min
Jeremy Denk is one of America's foremost pianists. Winner of a MacArthur 'Genius' Fellowship and the Avery Fisher Prize, Denk is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Denk returns frequently to Carnegie Hall and has appeared with renowned ensembles including the Chicago Symphony, New York Philharmonic, and Los Angeles Philharmonic. His recordings have received critical acclaim, including reaching No. 1 on the Billboard classical charts, and his writing has appeared in the New Yo...
Mar 23, 2023•16 min
Katherine Rundell is a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. Her bestselling books for children have been translated into more than thirty languages and have won multiple awards. Rundell is also the author of a book for adults, Why You Should Read Children’s Books, Even Though You Are So Old and Wise. She has written for, among others, the London Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, The New York Review of Books and The New York Times: mostly about books, though sometimes about night cl...
Mar 20, 2023•12 min
Sarah Raven On A Year Full Of Veg by Stories and inspiration from 5x15
Mar 13, 2023•1 hr
Suzanne Wrack is the Guardian and Observer’s women’s football correspondent - the first person to hold this role at a national newspaper. In A WOMAN’S GAME, she explores the history of women’s football from the Victorian era – when players wore high-heeled boots – to the present day. It is the story of a rise, fall, and rise again, from the game’s first appearance in England in the late nineteenth century, through to the height of its popularity in 1920, when crowds of 53,000 flocked to Goodison...
Mar 09, 2023•16 min
Thomas Halliday is an Associate Research Fellow at the Department of Earth Sciences of the University of Birmingham. His PhD won the Linnean Society Medal for the best thesis in the biological sciences in the UK, and he won the Hugh Miller Writing Competition in 2018. His book OTHERLANDS, a history of life on earth, was a Sunday Times bestseller, a Foyles Book of the Year 2022, and longlisted for Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction. He was raised in Rannoch in the Scottish Highlands, and now l...
Mar 06, 2023•15 min
Kirsty Sedgman is an award-winning cultural studies scholar based at the University of Bristol. She publishes and speaks on art, media, participation, and cultural sociology. She is the author of numerous academic publications, including two monographs and an edited book on theatre fandom, and is Editor of the Routledge book series in Audience Research. Kirsty has also written for The Stage, Exeunt, and the BBC’s Expert Series, and her work has been featured in the Times Literary Supplement, the...
Mar 02, 2023•12 min
Patrick Radden Keefe is an award-winning staff writer at the New Yorker and the author of the international bestsellers EMPIRE OF PAIN (winner of the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction), SAY NOTHING (winner of the Orwell Prize) and, most recently, ROGUES: True Stories of Grifters, Killers, Rebels and Crooks. First published in 2009, THE SNAKEHEAD is a sweeping history of the American dream, Manhattan’s Chinatown underbelly, and the mastermind behind one of the largest human-smuggling rings – ...
Feb 27, 2023•14 min
Dr Dean Burnett is a neuroscientist, blogger, sometime comedian and author. His previous books, THE IDIOT BRAIN and THE HAPPY BRAIN, were international bestsellers, while his Guardian articles have been read over sixteen million times. In EMOTIONAL IGNORANCE, he puts his own feelings under the microscope to ask where they come from, what purpose they serve, and why they make us feel the way they do. Addressing questions such as ‘Why can’t we think straight when hungry?’, ‘What’s the point of nig...
Feb 23, 2023•13 min
Will Self is the author of many novels and books of nonfiction, including How the Dead Live, which was shortlisted for the Whitbread Novel of the Year; The Butt, winner of the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction; and Umbrella, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. His latest work is Why Read: Selected Writings 2001-2021. 5x15 brings together five outstanding individuals to tell of their lives, passions and inspirations. There are only two rules - no scripts and only 15 min...
Feb 20, 2023•14 min
Simon Liebesny is a freelance editor and publishing consultant. From shortly after September 11th until shortly before Covid-19, he was first mate at Pluto Press, radical publisher of authors including bell hooks, Augusto Boal, Sheila Rowbotham and Ariel Dorfman. In a previous incarnation he was an organiser, trustee and all round wrangler for International Jazz Day, in spite of having absolutely no musical talent whatsoever. He is working on amplifying the WritersMosaic guest edition on Jewish ...
Feb 17, 2023•14 min
