5x15 - 5 speakers, 15 minutes each - April 2022

Matthew Green is a historian, writer and broadcaster who has appeared in documentaries on the BBC, ITV and Channel 4; he is also the founder of Unreal City Audio, which produces immersive tours of London as live events, podcasts and apps. In SHADOWLANDS he explores the dead ends of history - places lost to natural phenomena, war and plague, economic shifts and technical progress. Travelling across Britain, he discovers a landscape scarred with haunting and romantic remains; he also looks forward to ask what these ‘shadowlands’ can tell us about the fragility of our lives and habitations today.

Elif Shafak is an award winning Turkish British writer, the Booker Prize-shortlisted author of nineteen books, which have been translated into 55 languages. Her novel 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in this Strange World was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and The Forty Rules of Love, was chosen by the BBC as one of '100 Novels That Shaped Our World'. Her latest novel is the bestselling THE ISLAND OF MISSING TREES, which was this month long-listed for the Women’s Prize for Fiction. Set in Cyprus in 1974 it tells the story of two teenagers - one Turkish and Muslim, the other Greek and Christian - who become lovers, while exploring themes of belonging and identity, love and trauma, nature and renewal.

Delia Ephron is a bestselling author, screenwriter and playwright, whose movies include You’ve Got Mail, The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, Hanging Up and Michael. She collaborated with sister, Nora Ephron, on a play - Love, Loss and What I Wore - which ran for two years off-Broadway. In her new memoir, LEFT ON TENTH, she tells the story of how, in her seventies and recently widowed, she fell in love with a man she’d dated in college. But at the same time that she was embarking on a whirlwind romance, she discovered she was seriously ill. ‘Tender, witty and romantic’ - Emma Gannon. ’A beautiful book and a joy to read’ - Clover Stroud.

Howard Jacobson has written sixteen novels and five works of non-fiction. He has twice won the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Award for comic fiction, and in 2010 he won the Man Booker Prize for The Finkler Question. Published in the year of his 80th birthday, his new memoir, MOTHER’S BOY, is an exploration of being an insider and outsider, both English and Jewish. It is also a record of a writer’s beginnings - a story of learning to understand who you are before you can become the writer you were meant to be.

Julia Samuel, MBE, is a leading British psychotherapist and the author of the bestsellers This Too Shall Pass and Grief Works. She is Founder Patron of Child Bereavement UK and a Vice President of the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy; she has also presented the podcasts A Living Loss and Grief Works. In EVERY FAMILY HAS A STORY, she presents eight beautifully drawn case studies and analyses a range of common issues, from separation and step-relationships to leaving home and loss. A moving and reassuring meditation that shows how much is passed from one generation to the next - and how this inheritance can be faced together.