5x15 - with David Eagleman, Wade Davis and Helen Macdonald
Dr David Eagleman is a neuroscientist and internationally bestselling author. He teaches Brain Plasticity at Stanford University, is creator and host of the Emmy-nominated BBC television series The Brain, and is the Chief Executive Officer of NeoSensory, a company that builds the next generation of neuroscience hardware. The author of seven other books, he lives in Palo Alto, California.
Merlin Sheldrake is a biologist and a writer. He received a Ph.D. in Tropical Ecology from Cambridge University for his work on underground fungal networks in tropical forests in Panama, where he was a predoctoral research fellow of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute. He is a musician and keen fermenter. Entangled Life is his first book.
Helen Macdonald’s bestselling debut H is for Hawk brought the astonishing story of her relationship with goshawk Mabel to global critical acclaim and announced Macdonald as one of this century’s most important and insightful nature writers. H is for Hawk won the Samuel Johnson Prize for Nonfiction and the Costa Book Award, and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Kirkus Prize for Nonfiction, launching poet and falconer Macdonald as our preeminent nature essayist, with a semi-regular column in the New York Times Magazine.
In Vesper Flights, Macdonald brings together a collection of her best loved essays, along with new pieces on topics ranging from nostalgia for a vanishing countryside to the tribulations of farming ostriches to her own private vespers while trying to fall asleep.
Wade Davis is a writer, photographer, and filmmaker whose work has taken him from the Amazon to Tibet, Africa to Australia, Polynesia to the Arctic. Explorer-in-Residence at the National Geographic Society from 1999 to 2013, he is currently Professor of Anthropology and the BC Leadership Chair in Cultures and Ecosystems at Risk at the University of British Columbia.
He will be talking about his captivating new book that brings vividly to life the story of the great Rio Magdalena, illuminating Colombia's complex past, present, and future.
Dr Eugenia Cheng is Honorary Visiting Fellow at City, University of London and Scientist in Residence at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she teaches arts students to see the world differently through maths. A concert pianist, she also speaks French, English and Cantonese, and her mission in life is to rid the world of maths phobia. She is Math Columnist for the Wall Street Journal and the author of three books: the international best-seller How to Bake Pi: Easy Recipes for Understanding Complex Maths; the critically acclaimed The Art of Logic; and Beyond Infinity: An Expedition to the Outer Limits of Mathematics, which was shortlisted for the 2017 Royal Society Science Book Prize.