5x15 Notting Hill - February 2020
Before going to medical school, Dr Rachel Clarke was a television journalist and documentary maker. She now specialises in palliative medicine, caring deeply about helping patients live the end of their lives as fully and richly as possible – and in the power of human stories to build empathy and inspire change. Her new memoir, Dear Life is based on her work in a hospice and explores love, loss, grief, dying and what really matters at the end of life.
Gaia Vince is a science writer and broadcaster interested in the interplay between humans and the planetary environment. She has held senior editorial posts at Nature and New Scientist, and her writing has featured in newspapers and magazines including the Guardian, The Times and Scientific American. In 2015, she became the first woman to win the Royal Society Science Book of the Year Prize solo for her debut, Adventures in the Anthropocene: A Journey to the Heart of the Planet We Made. Transcendence is her new book, the follow up to the prize-winning Adventures in the Anthropocene. It tells the astonishing story of how culture enabled us to become the most successful species on Earth.
Sophie Walker is a feminist activist, founding leader of the Women’s Equality Party, and recently-appointed chief executive of Young Women’s Trust, the charity representing and supporting women aged 18-30 who are living on no or low pay. She is passionate about rebuilding society for and with (extra)ordinary women.
Paul Mason is the Economics Editor of Newsnight. He joined the BBC in 2001, making his first live appearance on the day of 9/11. His groundbreaking reports on the rise of China as an economic power won him the Wincott Award in 2003. He reported on the collapse of Lehman Brothers live from outside its New York HQ and "has hardly stopped for breath since then", reporting on the social and economic impact of the global meltdown from the mean streets of Gary, Indiana to the elite salons of Davos. He is the author of two books of non-fiction, Live Working or Die Fighting: How the working class went global and Meltdown: The end of the age of greed – and has twice been nominated for the Orwell Prize.
Adam Kucharski is an associate professor at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine. A mathematician by training, his work on global outbreaks such as the Ebola epidemic and the Zika virus has taken him from villages in the Pacific Islands to hospitals in Latin America. He is a TED fellow and winner of the 2016 Rosalind Franklin Award Lecture and the 2012 Wellcome Trust Science Writing Prize, and also the author of The Perfect Bet: How Science and Maths Are Taking the Luck Out of Gambling. His writing has appeared in the Observer, Financial Times, Scientific American, and New Statesman.