5x15

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 parliamentary sketch writer, author of the Digested Read columns and a contributor to GQ. He is also the author of many books including Decline and Fail and I, Maybot. He is an ardent supporter of Tottenham Hotspur FC and has written several books about the club including Vertigo: One Football Fan's Fear of Success and Harry's Games: Inside the Mind of Harry Redknapp. Viv Groskop is a writer, critic, broadcaster and stand-up comedian. She is the author of How to Own the Room: Women and the Art of Brilliant Speaking, also a Top 10 iTunes podcast, now in its 15th series, featuring guests like Hillary Clinton, Margaret Atwood, Nigella Lawson and Julie Andrews. Her latest book is Lift As You Climb: Women, Ambition and How to Change the Story. She has presented Front Row and Saturday Review on BBC Radio 4 and is a regular on BBC1’s This Week.

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 Greek oracles to octopuses, forests to satellites, Bridle tells a radical new story about ecology, technology and intelligence. How can we expand our definition of these terms to build a meaningful and free relationship with the non-human, one based on solidarity and cognitive diversity? We have so much to learn, and many worlds to gain. Praise for Ways of Being 'Iridescently original, deeply disorientating and yet somehow radically hopeful ... worth reading and rereading' Brian Eno 'Be prepared to re-evaluate your relationship with the amazing life forms with whom we share the planet. Fascinating, innovative and thought provoking: I thoroughly recommend Ways of Being' Dr Jane Goodall, DBE, Founder of the Jane Goodall Institute and UN Messenger of Peace 'Wonderful ... will make you feel and think the power of knowing how like all other lifeforms we are. There is nothing more important' Timothy Morton 'Brilliant ... Bridle shows the importance of listening to one another and our surroundings, and of creating new forms of community' Hans Ulrich Obrist James Bridle is author of the acclaimed New Dark Age, about technology, knowledge and the end of the future. They wrote and presented the BBC Radio 4 series New Ways of Seeing, about how technology is changing visual culture; their writing on art, politics, culture and technology has appeared in magazines and newspapers including the Guardian, Wired, New Statesman, Frieze and ICON. Their artworks have been commissioned by galleries and institutions, including the V&A, Whitechapel, Barbican, Hayward and Serpentine, and exhibited worldwide and on the internet. Brian Eno is a composer, producer and visual artist. He is widely identified with the appearance of 'Ambient Music' in the 1970s and of ‘Generative Music’ in the 1990s. He has worked extensively with David Bowie, U2, Coldplay, Laurie Anderson, Talking Heads and others. His visual and installation work has been presented in nearly 200 venues over the last 5 decades. Eno is a trustee of Client Earth, director of Earth Percent and co-founder of The Long Now Foundation- a society dedicated to the promotion of long-term thinking. With thanks for your support for 5x15 online! 5x15 brings together outstanding individuals to tell of their lives, passions and inspirations. Learn more about 5x15 events: 5x15stories.com Twitter: www.twitter.com/5x15stories Facebook: www.facebook.com/5x15stories Instagram: www.instagram.com/5x15stories

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-dropping and ferociously compelling reality. Empire of Pain is the story of a dynasty: a parable of twenty-first-century greed. Empire of Pain was an instant New York Times bestseller, winner of the Baillie Gifford Prize, shortlisted for the Financial Times Business Book of the Year and a Barack Obama Favorite Book of the Year. Praise for Empire of Pain: “Explosive” — Washington Post “A tour de force” — Financial Times 5x15 brings together outstanding individuals to tell of their lives, passions and inspirations. Learn more about 5x15 events: 5x15stories.com Twitter: www.twitter.com/5x15stories Facebook: www.facebook.com/5x15stories Instagram: www.instagram.com/5x15stories

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 decade passes, and the family assemble again, one question hovers over them. Can you ever escape the repercussions of a broken promise? Reunited by four funerals over three decades, the dwindling family reflects the atmosphere of its country—an atmosphere of resentment, renewal, and, ultimately, hope. Damon Galgut is the author of nine novels. He won the Booker Prize 2021 for The Promise, having been shortlisted for the prize twice before (The Good Doctor and In A Strange Room). He lives and works in Cape Town. Chris Power's fiction has appeared in Granta, The Stinging Fly, The Dublin Review, and The White Review, and been broadcast on BBC Radio 4. He writes for various newspapers and magazines and can sometimes be heard presenting Radio 4’s Open Book. 5x15 brings together outstanding individuals to tell of their lives, passions and inspirations. Learn more about 5x15 events: 5x15stories.com Twitter: www.twitter.com/5x15stories Facebook: www.facebook.com/5x15stories Instagram: www.instagram.com/5x15stories

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 resource for humans to use for our own ends, rather than a force of its own, full of agency and meaning. Writing against the backdrop of the global pandemic and the Black Lives Matter protests, Ghosh frames these historical stories in a way that connects our shared colonial past with the deep inequality we see around us today. By interweaving discussions on everything from the global history of the oil trade to the migrant crisis and the animist spirituality of indigenous communities around the world, The Nutmeg’s Curse offers a sharp critique of contemporary society and speaks to the profoundly remarkable ways in which human history is shaped by non-human forces. Amitav Ghosh was born in Calcutta and grew up in India, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. He studied in Delhi, Oxford and Alexandria and is the author of The Circle of Reason, The Shadow Lines, In An Antique Land, Dancing in Cambodia, The Calcutta Chromosome, The Glass Palace, The Hungry Tide, and The Ibis Trilogy, consisting of Sea of Poppies, River of Smoke and Flood of Fire. The Great Derangement; Climate Change and the Unthinkable, a work of non-fiction, appeared in 2016. "What do you do when the subject matter of life on this planet seems to lack . . . life? You read The Nutmeg's Curse, which eschews the leaden language of climate expertise in favor of the re-animating powers of mythology, etymology, and cosmology. Ghosh challenges readers to reckon with war, empire, and genocide in order to fully grasp the world-devouring logics that underpin ecological collapse. We owe a great debt to his brilliant mind, avenging pen, and huge soul. Do not miss this book-and above all, do not tell yourself that you already know its contents, because you don't." Naomi Klein on The Nutmeg's Curse 5x15 brings together outstanding individuals to tell of their lives, passions and inspirations. Learn more about 5x15 events: 5x15stories.com Twitter: www.twitter.com/5x15stories Facebook: www.facebook.com/5x15stories Instagram: www.instagram.com/5x15stories

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. The Instant is many things - luminous and intensely honest, powerful and poignant. Amy Liptrot is the author of The Outrun, a Sunday Times bestseller. She writes columns and reviews for various magazines and newspapers including the Guardian and the Spectator, and recently presented the BBC Radio 4 series The New Anatomy of Melancholy. Lucy Jones is a writer and journalist based in Hampshire, England. She previously worked at NME and the Daily Telegraph, and her writing on culture, science and nature has been published in BBC Earth, BBC Wildlife, The Sunday Times, the Guardian and the New Statesman. Her first book, Foxes Unearthed, was celebrated for its 'brave, bold and honest' (Chris Packham) account of our relationship with the fox. Losing Eden took Jones from forest schools in East London to the Svalbard Global Seed Vault via primeval woodlands, Californian laboratories and ecotherapists' couches. 5x15 brings together outstanding individuals to tell of their lives, passions and inspirations. Learn more about 5x15 events: 5x15stories.com Twitter: www.twitter.com/5x15stories Facebook: www.facebook.com/5x15stories Instagram: www.instagram.com/5x15stories