5 Speakers, 15 Minutes Each - April 2023

Patrick Bringley worked for ten years as a guard in the galleries of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Prior to that, he worked in the editorial events office at the New Yorker magazine. He lives with his wife and children in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. All the Beauty in the World, his first book, is a revelatory portrait of life in a great museum. It tells the moving story of the author's quest to find solace and meaning in art after his brother was diagnosed with fatal cancer, and he sought peace in the most beautiful place he knew.

Colin Grant's six books include Bageye at the Wheel, his memoir of growing up in 1970s Luton, which was shortlisted for the PEN Ackerley Prize. His history of epilepsy, A Smell of Burning, was a Sunday Times Book of the Year, and Homecoming: Voices of the Windrush Generation was a BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week. He is director of WritersMosaic and a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. In his latest memoir, I'm Black So You Don't Have to Be, written as a series of true short stories, Grant conjures his idiosyncratic Caribbean family: his proud mother, Ethlyn, who dreams of escaping their council house; his father, Bageye, whose ganja dealing enables Grant’s private school education; and his acerbic uncle, Castus, who predicts Grant’s four BBC disciplinary hearings and berates his nephew for not being black enough.

Frieda Hughes is a painter and poet. She has written several children's books, eight collections of poetry, articles for numerous magazines and newspapers, and was the Poetry columnist for The Times. As a painter, Frieda regularly exhibits in London and has a permanent exhibition at her private gallery in Wales. Her new book George: A Magpie Memoir, tells the story of what happened she moved to the depths of the Welsh countryside, and found herself rescuing a baby magpie, the sole survivor of a nest destroyed in a storm.

Tim Marshall is a leading authority on foreign affairs with more than 30 years of reporting experience. He was diplomatic editor at Sky News, and before that was working for the BBC and LBC/IRN radio. He has reported from 40 countries and covered conflicts in Croatia, Bosnia, Macedonia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon, Syria and Israel. He is the author of. the No. 1 Sunday Times bestsellers Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps that Tell You Everything You Need to Know About Global Politics and The Power of Geography: Ten Maps that Reveal the Future of Our World. In his gripping new book, The Future of Geography: How Power and Politics in Space Will Change Our World, he lays bare the new geopolitical realities to show how we got here and where we’re going, covering the new space race; great-power rivalry; technology; economics; war; and what it means for all of us down here on Earth.

Jenny Odell is a multi-disciplinary artist and author. Her first book was the New York Times Bestseller, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy. Her writing has appeared in The Atlantic, New York Times, Sierra Magazine, and more. She lives in Oakland, California. Her second book, Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock, examines how we got to the point where time became money. Taking inspiration from the pre-industrial, ecological and geological rhythms of our world, she offers us radical new models to live by that make a more humane, more hopeful existence seem possible.