5x15 Live at Kew Gardens

Jackie Morris is an award-winning British writer and illustrator. Morris studied at the Bath Academy of Art and started her career as an illustrator by working for magazines including Radio Times, New Statesman, New Society and Country Living. She has illustrated over 60 books, and is best known for the stunning The Lost Words (2017), co-written with Robert Macfarlane – a love song to many increasingly rare words pertaining to nature and the natural world. These illustrations earned Morris the Kate Greenaway Medal in 2019. Morris and Macfarlane’s second collaboration, The Lost Spells, was published in October 2020, and they are currently working on a third, The Book of Birds. Morris is nominated for the 2024 Andersen Award by the International Board of Books for Young People.

Professor Alexandre Antonelli is the Director of Science at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. He is also Professor in Biodiversity and Systematics at the University of Gothenburg and Visiting Professor at the Department of Plant Science at the University of Oxford. Antonelli’s passion is nature, and his mission mirrors that of RBG Kew’s: to understand and protect biodiversity for the well-being of people and the future of all life on Earth. To this end, he studies the distribution, evolution,threats and sustainable uses of species and develops methods to speed up scientific discovery and innovation. He has published over 180 peer-reviewed scientific articles and book chapters and his work has been cited over 12,600 times. He was named on the Web of Science/Clarivate 2020 and 2021 ‘Highly Cited Researchers’ list, which iidentifies pioneering researchers in the top 1% of their field. His first book, The Hidden Universe: Adventures in Biodiversity, was published in 2022.

Guy Shrubsole is a writer and environmental campaigner. He has worked for Rewilding Britain, Friends of the Earth, the UK government’s Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, and New Zealand’s Ministry of Agriculture. He has written widely for publications including the Guardian and New Statesman. His first book, Who Owns England?, was an instant Sunday Times bestseller.

Elizabeth-Jane Burnett is a writer of English and Kenyan heritage. She was born in Devon and her work is inspired by the landscape in which she was raised. She is the author of Swims, a Sunday Times Poetry Book of the Year, and The Grassling, and her poetry has been highly commended in the Forward Prize. She is a regular contributor to the Guardian Country Diary. In her new book, Twelve Words for Moss, she celebrates the unsung hero of the plant world with a unique blend of poetry, nature writing and memoir. Making her way through wetlands from Somerset to County Tyrone, Burnett discovers the hidden vibrancy and luminous beauty of these overlooked places.

Thomas Halliday is an Associate Research Fellow at the Department of Earth Sciences of the University of Birmingham. His PhD won the Linnean Society Medal for the best thesis in the biological sciences in the UK, and he won the Hugh Miller Writing Competition in 2018. His book OTHERLANDS, a history of life on earth, was a Sunday Times bestseller, a Foyles Book of the Year 2022, and longlisted for Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction. He was raised in Rannoch in the Scottish Highlands, and now lives in London with his family