5 Speakers, 15 Minutes - September 2024

Dr Rachel Clarke is an NHS palliative care doctor and the author of three Sunday Times bestselling non-fiction books. The most recent of these, Breathtaking (2021), was adapted into an acclaimed television series, broadcast on ITV in 2024. It reveals how she and her colleagues confronted the height of the Covid-19 pandemic. Dear Life (2020), depicting her work in an NHS hospice, was shortlisted for the 2020 Costa Biography Award and long-listed for the 2020 Baillie Gifford Prize. Your Life in My Hands(2017) documents life as a junior doctor. Before going to medical school, Rachel was a broadcast journalist. She produced and directed current affairs documentaries focusing on subjects such as Al Qaeda, the Iraq War and the civil war in the Democratic Republic of Congo. She continues to write regularly for the Guardian, Sunday Times, New Statesman and Lancet among others, and appears regularly on television and radio. Inspired by a visit to Ukraine during the conflict in late 2022, Rachel founded a UK-registered charity, Hospice Ukraine, which supports the work of local palliative care teams in Ukraine. Her new book, The Story of a Heart, is a moving and unforgettable story about how one family’s grief was transformed into a lifesaving gift.

Beatrice Forshall was born in France; she spent her early years there and in Catalonia. From 2017 to 2019 Beatrice was artist-in-residence with the Cambridge Conservation Initiative (CC1), a collaboration between researchers, policymakers and practitioners from the University of Cambridge and leading biodiversity conservation organisations. Her work is part of the permanent collection in CCI’s home, the David Attenborough Building. To date she has worked with the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), TRAFFIC, the wildlife trade monitoring network, BirdLife International and Fauna & Flora International. Beatrice’s book, The Book of Vanishing Species, was published by Bloomsbury in 2022. Beatrice makes engravings using an intaglio press. The process is long: first drawing, then engraving, printing and colouring by hand. The material on which Beatrice engraves is fragile, so print runs are short, rarely more than twenty-five, and each final image varies slightly in colour and sometimes composition from the rest of the series, making it unique. A percentage of the sales of Beatrice’s prints goes towards frontline conservation projects.

Charlotte Philby is a columnist and author. Her novel, Edith and Kim, is a fictional retelling of the lives of her grandfather, the infamous Soviet double agent Kim Philby (the elusive 'third man' in the notorious Cambridge spy ring), and Edith Tudor-Hart, the woman who recruited him to the Communist cause. Her fifth novel, The End of Summer, is a gripping, nuanced literary thriller from a writer at the top of her game. She worked for the Independent for eight years as a columnist, editor and reporter, and was shortlisted for the Cudlipp Prize for her investigative journalism at the 2013 Press Awards. A former contributing editor and feature writer at Marie Claire, she has written for the New Statesman, Elle, Telegraph, Guardian and Sunday Times, been interviewed on BBC Radio 3’s Free Thinking, BBC Radio 4’s Loose Ends and presented documentaries for the BBC World Service and The One Show.

Jay Rayner is an award-winning writer, journalist and broadcaster. He has been the restaurant critic for The Observersince 1999 (garnering millions of views per year), has presented the award-winning BBC Radio 4 show The Kitchen Cabinet for over a decade and is the author of a dozen books, most recently My Last Supper and Chewing the Fat. His varied television work includes his role for 15 years as a critic on MasterChef, food reporting for the BBC's The One Show and forming part of the expert panel on Top Chef Masters in the US. In March 2023 he was named Critic of the Year, in the UK Press Awards. His new book Nights Out At Home is a love letter to his favourite eating houses, in which he serves up recipes inspired by the superb dishes that have stolen his heart over the decades, giving home cooks the chance to experience the best of that food for themselves.

Professor Sir David Spiegelhalter FRS OBE is the closest thing the world of statistics has to a national treasure. His new book, The Art of Uncertainty: Living with Chance, Ignorance, Risk and Luck is an engaging and informative guide to living with uncertainty in a world that makes it inevitable. He is Chair of the Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication in the Centre for Mathematical Sciences at the University of Cambridge. His bestselling book, The Art of Statistics, has been published in 11 languages. His current roles are as Non-Executive Director, UK Statistics Authority; Mathematical Futures expert board of the Royal Society; Member of the Statistics Expert Group for the Infected Blood Inquiry, 2019 – 2024; and Advisor; NHS Maternity and Neonatal Outcomes Group.