5 Speakers, 15 Minutes Each - March 2025

Katherine Rundell is a fellow of St Catherine’s College, Oxford, and a contributing editor at the LRB. Her novels for children have won the Waterstones Children’s Book Prize, the Blue Peter Book Award and the Costa Children’s Book Award, among many others. Her books for adults include Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne, winner of the Baillie Gifford Prize, and Why You Should Read Children's Books, Even Though You Are So Old and Wise.

Nick Makoha is a Ugandan poet and playwright based in London. His debut collection, Kingdom of Gravity, was shortlisted for the Felix Dennis Prize and was one of the Guardian’s Best Books of the Year. His poems have appeared in The New York Times, the Poetry Review, Poetry Wales, Wasafiri, Boston Review, and Callaloo. He is the founder of Obsidian Foundation, winner of the 2021 Ivan Juritz Prize and the Poetry London Prize. His new collection, The New Carthaginians, is inspired by the artistic techniques of Basquiat.

Dr Suzanne O'Sullivan has been a consultant in neurology since 2004. She specialises in the investigation of complex epilepsy and also has an active interest in psychogenic disorders. Suzanne's first book It's All in Your Head, won both the Wellcome Book Prize and the Royal Society of Biology Book Prize and The Sleeping Beauties was shortlisted for the Royal Society Science Book Prize. Her new book, The Age of Diagnosis, looks at how modern medicine is redrawing the boundaries between sickness and health and the impact this is having on our lives.

Jonathan Sumption is a British judge and historian, who served as a Supreme Court Justice from 2012 - 2018. He is the author of the Sunday Times bestseller Trials of the State, Law in a Time of Crisis, and Divided Houses, which won the 2009 Wolfson History Prize. His new book, The Challenges of Democracy, explores the state of democracy, the most urgent and far-reaching political issue of our day.

Carole Cadwalladr is a Pulitzer-nominated investigative journalist who broke the Cambridge Analytica/Facebook scandal with the Guardian and New York Times. She is now the co-founder of the Nerve, a new media start-up focussed on culture, politics and technology which she launched in September 2025 with four fellow journalists (all women) from the Observer following its takeover by Tortoise Media. Cadwalladr, who fought off a SLAPP lawsuit, is a press freedom advocate and campaigns on tech accountability with the Citizens, a tech justice non-profit she co-founded. Her personal newsletter, How to Survive the Broligarchy, has 124k subscribers, can be found on Substack.