5 Speakers, 15 Minutes Each - June 2025
Kaliane Bradley is a British-Cambodian writer and editor based in London. Her short stories have appeared in Electric Literature, Catapult, Somesuch Stories and The Willowherb Review, among others. She was the winner of the 2022 Harper's Bazaar Short Story Prize and the 2022 V.S. Pritchett Short Story Prize. Her highly acclaimed first novel, The Ministry of Time, was the bestselling debut novel of last year, an instant Sunday Times and New York Times bestseller, and one of Barack Obama's picks for summer reading 2024.
John Harris is a multiple award-winning writer, journalist, podcaster and presenter. He has written professionally about music since he was 19, and is also known for his pioneering political and social writing, centred on his weekly column in The Guardian. His acclaimed books included The Last Party and Get Back, the authorised book that accompanied Peter Jackson's Beatles documentary series. His new memoir, Maybe I'm Amazed, explores creativity and neurodivergence, and tells the extraordinary story of how music opened up the world to his son.
Robert Harris is the author of fifteen bestselling novels, including the Cicero Trilogy (Imperium, Lustrum and Dictator), Archangel, Pompeii, The Ghost, An Officer and a Spy, which won four prizes including the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction, Conclave, Munich, The Second Sleep, V2 and Act of Oblivion. His work has been translated into forty languages and nine of his books have been adapted for cinema and television, most recently the Oscar-nominated film Conclave. His thrilling new novel, Precipice, weaves fact and fiction to tell the story of the love affair between HH Asquith and Venetia Stanley.
De Kai is an AI pioneer honored for his contributions as a Founding Fellow in computational linguistics. He is Independent Director of the AI ethics think tank The Future Society and was one of eight inaugural members of Google’s AI Ethics council. De Kai holds a joint appointment at HKUST’s Department of Computer Science and Engineering and Berkeley’s International Computer Science Institute. His new book, Raising AI, shows how society can not only survive the AI revolution but flourish in a more humane, compassionate, and understanding world where we all play a part - alongside our artifical children.
Larry Lamb is a well-known British actor and presenter with a career spanning several decades. He is best recognized for his acting roles in the BBC soap opera EastEnders and the sitcom Gavin & Stacey. Larry has also hosted a variety of TV shows and radio programs, including Britain by Bike for Channel 5 appearing alongside his son, George Lamb, and he is is a familiar face on the Loose Women panel. Informed by his years of experience in film and television, his new novel All Wrapped Up gives an inside look at the industry; the trials, tribulations, and hard-won successes of producing a piece of cinema.