5 Speakers, 15 Minutes Each - November 2023

David Grann is a staff writer at The New Yorker. He has written about everything from New York City's antiquated water tunnels to the hunt for the giant squid. His stories have appeared in several anthologies. He has written for the New York Times Magazine, the Atlantic Monthly, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal and the New Republic. He lives in New York with his wife and two children. His books include the international best-seller Killers of the Flower Moon, and his new book, The Wager, tells a mesmerising story of shipwreck, mutiny and murder.

Kassia St Clair studied the history of women's dress and the masquerade during the eighteenth century at Bristol and Oxford. She has since written about design and culture for the Economist, House & Garden, TLS, Quartz and New Statesman, and has had a column about colour in Elle Decoration since 2013. Her first book The Secret Lives of Colourwas a top-ten bestseller, a Radio 4 Book of the Week and has been translated into over a dozen languages; her second, The Golden Thread, was a Sunday Times Book of the Year and was shortlisted for the Somerset Maugham Award. She lives in London. Her new book,The Race to the Future, tells the incredible true story of a quest against the odds that shaped the world we live in today.

Rosamund Young runs Kite’s Nest Farm with her brother Richard and her partner Gareth; on the farm nature is left to itself as much as possible and the animals receive exceptional kindness and consideration. Kite’s Nest Farm produces beef and lamb from 100% grass-fed animals which are butchered and sold in the farm shop. Young is the author of The Secret Life of Cows, which was published by Faber & Faber in 2017 with a foreword by Alan Bennett; it was a Sunday Times bestseller and a Times Book of the Year. Her new book, The Wisdom of Sheep & Other Animals, peeks into the surprising private lives of some of our most familiar animals.

Paul Caruana Galizia became a reporter after his mother Daphne was assassinated and since then has won a British Journalism Award, a Media Excellence Award from the Association of International Broadcasters, a silver medal at the British Podcast Awards, and a bronze medal at the Radio Academy ARIAs. With his two brothers, he won a Magnitsky Human Rights Award and an Anderson-Norman-Lucas Award for. His book A Death in Malta is a spellbinding account of the shocking murder of his muckraking mother and the search for justice that has reverberated far beyond their tiny homeland.

Adam Sisman is a writer specialising in biography, living in Bristol, England. He is the author of Boswell's Presumptuous Task, winner of a National Book Critics Circle Award, and the biographer of John le Carré, A. J. P. Taylor and Hugh Trevor-Roper. Among his other works are two volumes of letters by Patrick Leigh Fermor. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and an Honorary Professor at the University of St Andrews. "Mr. Sisman has an ideal biographical style: inquisitive and open, serious yet not severe," Dwight Garner wrote of Sisman's life of Hugh Trevor-Roper in the New York Times: "I’d read him on anyone.”