5 Speakers, 15 Minutes - October 2024

Rory Cellan-Jones was the BBC’s principal technology correspondent until 2021. He now writes an influential Substack column on medical innovation, tech and his beloved Romanian rescue dog, Sophie. Through this and his Twitter following @ruskin147 he spreads awareness of technological developments in the fields of medicine, health care and – more specifically – Parkinson’s. Together with Jeremy Paxman and several others he has begun a new podcast on Parkinson’s called Movers and Shakers. He also shares the progress of #SophiefromRomania on @ruskin147.

Shami Chakrabarti is a leading British human rights lawyer and campaigner who has written and broadcast widely and held a number of public roles in recent decades. A legislator in the House of Lords, she is the author ofOn Liberty and Of Women. Director of Liberty (the National Council for Civil Liberties) from 2003 to 2016, she was Shadow Attorney General for England and Wales from 2016 to 2020. Her latest book, Human Rights, looks at the historic national and international struggles for human rights, from ancient Babylon to the present day, and offers an indispensable guide to the law and logic underpinning human dignity and universal freedoms.

Dava Sobel is the author of the international bestseller, Longitude, the bestselling Pulitzer Prize finalist Galileo‘s Daughter, The Planets, A More Perfect Heaven, And the Sun Stood Still, and The Glass Universe, and co-author of The Illustrated Longitude. She is the recipient of the Individual Public Service Award from the National Science Board, the Bradford Washburn Award, the Kumpke-Roberts Award from the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, and a Guggenheim Fellowship, among other honours. A former New York Times science reporter and current editor of the “Meter” poetry column in Scientific American, she lives on Long Island. Her new book, Elements of Marie Curie, illuminates the trailblazing life and enduring influence of one of the most consequential figures of our time.

Gary Stevenson is the author of The Trading Game, a sensational debut that offers a candid and thrilling look at the intoxicating world of trading - from someone who survived the game and then blew it all wide open. It was an instant Sunday Times #1 best-seller upon publication in March, and has been described by Rory Stewart as an 'incredibly important and timely book.' Stevenson eventually left his trading career behind, convinced that solving inequality was the only way to repair the world economy. He has since studied for an MPhil at Oxford, worked with economic think-tanks and founded a YouTube channel, GarysEconomics, teaching people about real-world economics. GaryEconomics explains some of the biggest conundrums in our economic system and has a track record of successfully forecasting interest rates, asset prices and inflation.

Kate Summerscale was working on the obituaries desk at the Daily Telegraph when she came across the inspiration for her first book. She later went on to develop a
ground-breaking new form of narrative non-fiction writing which culminated in her
number-one bestselling The Suspicions of Mr Whicher, winner of the Samuel Johnson
Prize for Non-Fiction 2008 and later adapted into an ITV drama starring Peter Capaldi.
She began writing her new book The Peepshow in the spring of 2021, soon after the abduction and murder of Sarah Everard. She hoped that a case from the past might help her understand why a man might choose to kill women – and why we are so fascinated by such stories. Summerscale has published five previous books with Bloomsbury. To date her books have sold more than 600,000 copies in the UK.