Atul Gawande and Will Self speak about what matters in the end.  In his book Being Mortal author Atul Gawande tackles the hardest challenge of his profession: how medicine can not only improve life but also the process of its ending

Atul Gawande is a staff writer for The New Yorker, and author of four books. He is Executive Director of Ariadne Labs, a joint center for health systems innovation. He practices general and endocrine surgery at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. He's interviewed by best selling author and novelist Will Self about his book Being Mortal.

5x15 brings together five outstanding individuals to tell of their lives, passions and inspirations. There are only two rules - no scripts and only 15 minutes each.

Learn more about 5x15 events: 5x15stories.com
Twitter: www.twitter.com/5x15stories
Facebook: www.facebook.com/5x15stories
Instagram: www.instagram.com/5x15stories

Being mortal - a conversation with Atul Gawande and Will Self

Best selling novelist Matt Haig talks about depression. Warm, witty, honest and human, this is a manifesto for staying alive, whatever your demons.


Matt Haig writes books for both adults and children, often blending the worlds of domestic reality and outright fantasy, with a quirky twist. The Guardian has described his writing as 'delightfully weird' and the New York Times has called him 'a novelist of great talent' whose writing is 'funny, riveting and heartbreaking'. 
His novels for adults are The Last Family in England, narrated by a labrador and optioned for film by Brad Pitt; The Dead Fathers Club (2006), an update of Hamlet featuring an 11-year-old boy; The Possession of Mr Cave (2008), about a man obsessed with his daughter's safety, and The Radleys (2010) which won Channel 4's TV Book Club public vote and was shortlisted for a Galaxy National Book Award (UK). The film rights to all his adult novels have been sold. His next adult novel is The Humans (2013).
His multi-award winning popular first novel for children, Shadow Forest, was published in 2007 and its sequel, The Runaway Troll, in 2009. His most recent children's novel is To Be A Cat (2012).

5x15 brings together five outstanding individuals to tell of their lives, passions and inspirations. There are only two rules - no scripts and only 15 minutes each.

Learn more about 5x15 events: 5x15stories.com
Twitter: www.twitter.com/5x15stories
Facebook: www.facebook.com/5x15stories
Instagram: www.instagram.com/5x15stories

Reasons to stay alive - Matt Haig

Writer and blogger Reni Eddo-Lodge talks about her acclaimed book Why I Am No Longer Talking to White People About Race. She also hosts the About Race podcast which looks at the recent history that lead to the politics of today and features key voices from the last few decades of anti-racist activism.

5x15 brings together five outstanding individuals to tell of their lives, passions and inspirations. There are only two rules - no scripts and only 15 minutes each.

Learn more about 5x15 events: 5x15stories.com
Twitter: www.twitter.com/5x15stories
Facebook: www.facebook.com/5x15stories
Instagram: www.instagram.com/5x15stories

Why I am no longer talking to white people about race - Reni Eddo-Lodge

Dark data, dark money & Putin's Russia: how British democracy is under assault.

An unmissable evening with Carole Cadwalladr and Luke Harding, two prize winning investigative journalists, whose recent work has dominated news headlines across the world. The evening was hosted by journalist and writer Oliver Bullough.

In a series of articles for the Observer, Cadwalladr exposed the 'fake news ecosystem' of the right wing press. Through her investigations into Cambridge Analytica, she exposed the alleged malpractice of the Vote Leave campaign during the 2016 EU membership Referendum. She also drew links between Nigel Farage and the 2016 presidential campaign of Donald Trump and the Russian influences on that campaign. For this brilliant work, in June she was awarded the 2018 Orwell Prize.

Cadwalladr is joined by Luke Harding,  award winning Guardian journalist, whose recent book Collusion: Secret Meetings, Dirty Money and How Russia Helped Donald Trump Win was published to huge acclaim at the end of last year. Between 2007 and 2011 he was the Guardian's Moscow bureau chief: the Kremlin expelled him from the country in the first case of its kind since the cold war. He is the author of A Very Expensive Poison: the definitive story of the Murder of Litvinenko, as well as books on Edward Snowden and WikiLeaks. In  his most recent book, Collusion, Harding reveals the inside story of Trump's decade long relationship with Russia and how Russia if reshaping the modern world order to its advantage.

Recorded at The Emmanuel Centre in London in September 2018.

5x15 brings together five outstanding individuals to tell of their lives, passions and inspirations. There are only two rules - no scripts and only 15 minutes each.

Learn more about 5x15 events: http://5x15stories.com
Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/5x15stories
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/5x15stories
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/5x15stories

Dark data, dark money and Putin's Russia - Carole Cadwalladr, Luke Harding & Oliver Bullough

5x15 hosted a special discussion with Fintan O'Toole and Misha Glenny chaired by Jon Snow at the Emmanuel Centre in Westminster to discuss Brexit and Fintan's new book Heroic Failure. It's a fierce, funny and smart book about the delusions of Brexit, the threat it poses to economic prosperity, peace in Ireland and the tradition of British democracy. 

England's favourite poem, Rudyard Kipling’s 'If', says that triumph and disaster are the same thing. It enjoins the English to “lose, and start again at your beginnings/ And never breathe a word about your loss.”  Most modern English heroics are screw-ups, retreats or disasters: the charge of the Light Brigade, the doomed Franklin expedition to find the Northwest Passage, “Scott of the Antarctic”, Gordon of Khartoum, the flight from Dunkirk.  The parallels with Brexit are obvious, but the problem is that the cult of heroic failure was developed precisely in an empire that could afford to play up its failures because it was so successful. Its pathos becomes bathos in a post-imperial world. Failure is no longer heroic - it is just failure.  Fintan O'Toole's ruthless dissection of the psychology and politics of Brexit is a stirring call to preserve democratic values and rational thought.

Recorded live at the Emmanuel Centre in London on 21st January 2019.

5x15 brings together outstanding individuals to tell of their lives, passions and inspirations.

Learn more about 5x15 events: 5x15stories.com
Twitter: www.twitter.com/5x15stories
Facebook: www.facebook.com/5x15stories
Instagram: www.instagram.com/5x15stories

Heroic Failure- Brexit and the politics of pain- Fintan O'Toole and Misha Glenny chaired by Jon Snow

Revolution can’t take its poetry from the past – but only from the future.
On 14th May, at EartH Hackney, philosopher and activist Srećko Horvat was in conversation with the experimentalist, activist and artist Brian Eno, to discuss Horvat's new book Poetry From the Future. Is a global liberation movement the only way to save humanity? Poetry From the Future draws on myriad sources from contemporary culture, historical archives and stories of resistance from Horvat's own island in Croatia, as well as the partisan liberation movements of Nazi-occupied Yugoslavia, refugee camps and political frontlines of 21st century Europe, to argue that we need to move beyond borders, national identities and the redundant narratives of the past.  What is the role of the arts in how we understand politics or history? How can hidden narratives be brought to light? Are we as free as we like to think? How does film, documentary, art or music help us to see the world anew and how important is that now? Faced with our last chance, we urgently need a radical new vision for civilisation. An unmissable evening of debate, provocation and conversation, chaired by Rosie Boycott. 

‘Infused with a contagious enthusiasm and optimism that never ignores the grim reality of our present, Poetry from the Future is a radical call for action.’ Alfonso Cuarón

‘A compelling vision, an urgent necessity, and not beyond reach.’ Noam Chomsky

5x15 brings together five outstanding individuals to tell of their lives, passions and inspirations. There are only two rules - no scripts and only 15 minutes each.

Learn more about 5x15 events: 5x15stories.com
Twitter: www.twitter.com/5x15stories
Facebook: www.facebook.com/5x15stories
Instagram: www.instagram.com/5x15stories ‏

Poetry From the Future - Srecko Horvat and Brian Eno with Rosie Boycott

Join 5x15 on a mind-altering adventure with the pioneering, genre-busting writer Michael Pollan in conversation with John Crace. Delving into states of consciousness, looking at the latest brain science and visiting the thriving underground community of psychedelic therapists, we’ll immerse ourselves in what is a major new field of therapeutic research.

In his thrilling chronicle How to Change Your Mind, we meet the scientists, professionals, seekers and patients exploring the effects of LSD on the mind, creativity and personal experience and discover what the new science of psychedelics teaches us about consciousness, dying, addiction, depression, and transcendence.

A profound shift in the public discussion around psychedelics and their positive, therapeutic affects is taking place across the US and UK. It has always been clear that psychedelics offer a paradigm shifting tool, and now with increased funding, psychedelic research is becoming mainstream. It is set to have a major impact on science and psychiatry, mental health, neuroscience and social science.

Michael is in conversation with leading Guardian journalist John Crace.

“a mind-altering book… full of transformations” Evening Standard

“… deeply absorbing, wise and beautifully written” Literary Review

More about Michael Pollan: For 25 years Michael has been writing pioneering books about how we live today. He is an award-winning author, activist and journalist, author of The Omnivore's Dilemma, In Defence of Food and Cooked (also a successful Netflix series). Time magazine has named him one of the hundred most influential people in the world. He lives in the Bay Area of California with his wife and son

How To Change Your Mind- the new science of psychedelics- Michael Pollan And John Crace

Gaia Vince on Transcendence - How Humans Evolved through Fire, Language, Beauty and Time. 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. She also writes and presents science programmes for radio and television. Her research takes her across the world: she has visited more than 60 countries, lived in three and is currently based in London. 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. Humans are the most successful species on Earth; a planet-altering force of nature. Meanwhile, our closest living relatives, the now-endangered chimpanzees, continue to live as they have for millions of years. Yet we evolved through the same process. What are we then? And now we have remade the world, what are we becoming?


5x15 brings together five outstanding individuals to tell of their lives, passions and inspirations. There are only two rules - no scripts and only 15 minutes each.

Learn more about 5x15 events: 5x15stories.com
Twitter: www.twitter.com/5x15stories
Facebook: www.facebook.com/5x15stories
Instagram: www.instagram.com/5x15stories

Transcendence - How Humans Evolved through Fire, Language, Beauty and Time - Gaia Vince

George Monbiot is an author, Guardian columnist and environmental campaigner. His best-selling books include Feral: Rewilding the land, sea and human life and Heat: how to stop the planet burning; his latest is Out of the Wreckage: a new politics for an age of crisis. George cowrote the concept album Breaking the Spell of Loneliness with musician Ewan McLennan; and has made a number of viral videos. One of them, adapted from his 2013 TED talk, How Wolves Change Rivers, has been viewed on YouTube over 40m times. Another, on Natural Climate Solutions, that he co-presented with Greta Thunberg, has been watched over 50m times.

5x15 brings together five outstanding individuals to tell of their lives, passions and inspirations. There are only two rules - no scripts and only 15 minutes each.

This talk was recorded at the second online 5x15 in May 2020.

Learn more about 5x15 events: 5x15stories.com
Twitter: www.twitter.com/5x15stories
Facebook: www.facebook.com/5x15stories
Instagram: www.instagram.com/5x15stories

5x15 May 18th online event 

It's time for a Great Reset - George Monbiot

George Saunders has been teaching the Russian short story for over twenty years. In his new book, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, he explores seven iconic stories by authors including Chekhov and Tolstoy, showing us how they work, why we keep reading, and what they can tell us about the world today. Funny and frank, George Saunders shows how the best stories can spark our humanity as well as our imaginations, and why fiction is more important than ever in these turbulent times.

George Saunders is the author of nine books including Lincoln in the Bardo, winner of the 2017 Man Booker Prize and the Premio Rezzori prize, which was also shortlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award. Tenth of December won the inaugural Folio Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Award. Saunders has received MacArthur and Guggenheim fellowships and the PEN/Malamud Prize for excellence in the short story, and was recently elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2013, he was named one of the world’s 100 most influential people by Time magazine.

Max Porter is the author of Lanny, longlisted for the Booker Prize, and Grief is the Thing with Feathers, winner of the International Dylan Thomas Prize and shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award and the Goldsmiths Prize. He is the recipient of the Sunday Times / Peters Fraser + Dunlop Young Writer of the Year Award. His new book, The Death of Francis Bacon, is published by Faber in January 2021.

5x15 brings together outstanding individuals to tell of their lives, passions and inspirations. There are only two rules - no scripts and only 15 minutes each.

Learn more about 5x15 events: 5x15stories.com
Twitter: www.twitter.com/5x15stories
Facebook: www.facebook.com/5x15stories
Instagram: www.instagram.com/5x15stories

A masterclass on writing and life - George Saunders and Max Porter in conversation

"A pleasingly simple concept... one of the best things I've come upon in the last six months" (The Telegraph - 'Best Podcasts')

5 speakers, 15 minutes each. Script free and against a less-than-precise clock, some of the world's leading figures in the arts and sciences deliver talks about their enduring achievements, wildest moments or deepest passions. It's inspiring, informative, provoking, and above all, entertaining. Based in London but making forays to Sydney, New York and Milan, 5x15 has featured Joanna Lumley, Brian Eno, Jonathan Safran Foer, Jung Chang, Ruby Wax and Alain de Botton.

Popular tracks tagged #5x15