5x15 Hackney - February 2020

James O’Brien is a Sunday Times Bestselling author and LBC Radio Presenter. He has presented BBC Two’s Newsnight and his own daytime talk show O’Brien on ITV. His daily current affairs phone-in show on LBC has 1.2 million weekly listeners and his new, award-winning podcast, Full Disclosure, has been downloaded four million times. How To Be Right is his first book.

Tracey Thorn is a singer-songwriter and writer, best known for her seventeen years in bestselling duo Everything But The Girl. She grew up as the youngest of three children in Brookmans Park, Hatfield, Hertfordshire, and started her first band while still at school. Since then, she has released four solo albums, one movie soundtrack, a large handful of singles. Her books, include the Sunday Times bestselling memoir, Bedsit Disco Queen, and most recently Another Planet. It tells the story of the time before she became an acclaimed musician and writer, when she was a typical teenager in suburbia.

Robin Ince is a comedian, an author, a broadcaster and a populariser of scientific ideas. The Guardian once declared him a ‘becardiganed polymath’ which seems about right. He is probably best known as the co-host of the Sony Gold Award winning BBC Radio 4 series The Infinite Monkey Cage with Professor Brian Cox. He also co-hosts the podcast Robin and Josie’s Book Shambles, which gains over 100,000 listeners a month, which is part of The Cosmic Shambles Network, which he also co-created. His most recent book, I’m a Joke and So Are You, was described by Chortle as ‘one of the best books ever written about what it means to be a comedian’. He edited and written short stories for two volumes of Dead Funny: Horror Stories by Comedians, as well as writing and presenting documentaries about the history of self-help, comedians and melancholy, Jeff Wayne’s War of the Worlds and more. As a stand up he has toured the world and won three Chortle Awards, the Time Out Outstanding Achievement Award and was nominated for the British Comedy Awards Best Live show.

Hallie Rubenhold is a bestselling author, social historian, broadcaster and historical consultant for TV and film. Her most recent book, The Five; The Untold Lives of The Women Killed by Jack the Ripper (Doubleday, 2019) is this year’s winner of the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-fiction. The Five is a work of women’s social history, following her books Lady Worsely’s Whim, The Scandalous Lady W (turned into a BBC drama) and Harris’ List of Covent Garden Ladies (which inspired The Mermaid and Mrs Hancock and ITV’s Harlots). By drawing upon a wealth of formerly unseen archival material and adding a full historical context to the victims’ lives, The Five promises to change the narrative of these murders forever.

Hashi Mohamed arrived in Britain at the age of nine as a child refugee, and is now a barrister at No5 Chambers in London. He is also a broadcaster, having appeared on BBC Radio 4, and presented Adventures in Social Mobility (April 2017) and Macpherson: What Happened Next (2019). He is also a contributor to the Guardian, The Times and Prospect. He mentors many young people at various stages of their career and is also a trustee of Big Education, a trust which oversees three inspirational schools in London and the South East.