5x15 - April - Free Online Event

Margaret Heffernan is one of the UK’s most highly regarded thought leaders. An entrepreneur, CEO and keynote speaker, she is the also author of five previous books: Beyond Measure, A Bigger Prize, Wilful Blindness, Women on Top and The Naked Truth. The best-selling Willful Blindness : Why We Ignore the Obvious at our Peril was named one of the most important business books of the decade by the Financial Times, and was shortlisted for the FT Business Book Award 2011. Her TED talks have been seen by over eleven million people and in 2015 TED published Beyond Measure: The Big Impact of Small Changes. Born in Texas, raised in Holland and educated at Cambridge University, Margaret worked in BBC Radio for five years where she wrote, directed, produced and commissioned documentaries and dramas, and has herself written five plays.

Jonathan Drori is a trustee of The Eden Project and Cambridge University Botanic Garden, an Ambassador for the Woodland Trust and the WWF, and Honorary Professor at Birmingham University’s Institute of Forest Research. He is also the author of the runaway best sellers, Around the World In 80 Trees and Around the World in 80 Plants, revealing in awe-inspiring detail how the worlds of trees and plants are intricately entwined with our own history, culture and folklore. Previously, Jon was a Trustee of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, and for BBC TV, he was responsible for more than fifty science documentaries and series. He is known for several botanical TED talks, which have been viewed millions of times.

James Naughtie, special correspondent for BBC News, is one of the country's best-known broadcasters, having presented Today on Radio 4 for 21 years. He has hosted every edition of Bookclub on that network since it began in 1998 and written and presented many documentaries on books and music on radio and television. Last year he published an account of fifty years of travels in the United States - On the Road - and later this year he will publish the third in a series of espionage novels.

Mark O’Connell is the author of A Thread of Violence, Notes from an Apocalypse, and To Be a Machine, which was awarded the 2018 Wellcome Book Prize, the 2019 Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, and was shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction. He is a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books. His work has appeared in The New Yorker,The New York Times Magazine, Slate, and The Guardian. He lives in Dublin with his family.

Hadley Freeman grew up in New York City and London. She has been a staff writer at the
Guardian since 2000 and has contributed to many other publications, including Vogue (US and
UK.) She is the author of The Meaning of Sunglasses published by Penguin in 2009, Be Awesome: Modern Essays for Modern Ladies, and Life Moves Pretty Fast: The Lessons We Learned from 80s Movies, published by 4th Estate in 2014 and 2016 respectively. Her family memoir, House of Glass: The Story and Secrets of a Twentieth-Century Jewish Family, is her fourth book. She lives in London with her partner and their three children.

Craig Brown is the author of 18 books, and a prolific journalist. He has been writing his parodic diary in Private Eye since 1989. He is the only person ever to have won three different Press Awards – for best humorist, columnist and critic – in the same year. He has been a columnist for, among others, The Guardian, The Times, The Spectator and The Daily Telegraph. He currently writes for The Daily Mail and the The Mail on Sunday. His book, Ma’am Darling: 99 Glimpses of Princess Margaret won an international bestseller and won the James Tait Black Memorial Award, the South Bank Sky Arts Literature Award. One Two Three Four is his latest book. It's a kaleidoscopic mixture of history, etymology, diaries, autobiography, fan letters, essays, parallel lives, party lists, charts, interviews, announcements and stories published to coincide with the 50 anniversary of the break-up of the Beatles.