5 Speakers, 15 Minutes Each - March 2024

After a career in journalism and publishing, Chris Anderson became the curator of the TED Conference in 2001 and has developed it as a global platform for identifying and disseminating ideas worth spreading. His TED mantra – ‘ideas worth spreading’ – continues to blossom on an international scale, with more than one billion TED Talks viewed annually. He lives in New York City and London.Blending cutting-edge psychological research with a wealth of inspiring stories, Infectious Generosity: The Ultimate Idea Worth Spreading is a playbook for how to embark on our own generous acts. Whether giving gifts of money, time, talent, connection or kindness, Anderson teaches readers how to harness the power of the internet to have a transformative impact on the world.

Catherine Coldstream grew up in London and converted to Catholicism in her early twenties. She was a Carmelite nun for twelve years. Since leaving the monastery, she took an undergraduate degree as a mature student, at the University of Oxford, and taught theology, philosophy and ethics for ten years. She has never stopped thinking about her life as a nun and wrote about it as a way of understanding the experiences that shaped her. In her striking memoir Cloistered, she describes life as a contemplative nun in the 1990s, and the dramatic events which led to her flight from the monastery on the brink of the Millennium.

Henry Dimbleby is the co-founder of LEON, and the Director of The Sustainable Restaurant Association, which runs some of London's most successful street food markets. His work with DEFRA culminated in the National Food Strategy – a policy proposal widely praised by industry wide figures such as Yotam Ottolenghi and Sir Partha Dasgupta. In 2013 he co-authored The School Food Plan, which set out actions to transform what children eat in schools and how they learn about food.

Vincent Deary is professor of applied health psychology at Northumbria University, where his research focuses on the development of new psychosocial interventions for people with a variety of health complaints, including cancer survivors and fear of falling in older adults. As a clinician he works in the UK's first trans-diagnostic Fatigue Clinic, to help people for whom fatigue is a disabling symptom. He is the author ofHow We Are. His highly acclaimed new book, How We Break: Navigating the Wear and Tear of Living, explores what happens when our minds and bodies are pushed beyond their limits, and makes a bold case for the power of rest and recuperation.

Colum McCann’s seven novels and three collections of short stories have been published in over forty languages and received some of the world’s most prestigious literary awards and honours, including the National Book Award for his novel Let the Great World Spin in 2013. TransAtlantic was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2013, and his most recent novel, Apeirogon, also longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, is an international bestseller on four continents. In his new book, McCann tells the story of Diane Foley, mother of American journalist James Foley, who was kidnapped in northern Syria, and murdered by ISIS in a public beheading that would ricochet in video around the world. A testament to the power of radical empathy and moral courage, American Mother takes us inside one woman’s extraordinary journey to find connection in a world torn asunder, and to fight for others as a way to keep her son’s memory alive.