5x15: 5 speakers, 15 minutes each with Luke Harding and The Secret Barrister

Lea Ypi’s memoir of growing up in communist Albania, FREE, is an unforgettable coming-of-age story exploring the meaning of freedom in all its forms. It was hailed by Phillipe Sands as ‘a lyrical memoir, of deep and affecting power, of the sweet smell of humanity mingled with flesh, blood and hope’ and was shortlisted for the 2021 Costa Biography Award and the 2021 Baille Gifford Prize. Lea Ypi is Professor of Political Theory at the London School of Economics, and Political Science and Adjunct Professor in Philosophy at the Australian National University. She speaks six languages and lives in London.

Luke Harding returns to 5x15 to discuss Ukraine, Russia, Putin and what happens next. Luke is an award-winning foreign correspondent with the Guardian and a #1 New York Timesbestselling author. 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 Collusion, A Very Expensive Poison, The Snowden Files, and Mafia State, as well as the co-author of WikiLeaks and The Liar (nominated for the Orwell Prize). Two of Harding's books – The Fifth Estate and Snowden – have been made into films.

The Secret Barrister is a junior barrister specialising in criminal law. Their first book, The Secret Barrister, won a number of awards and has been in the top ten bestsellers for more than a year; their second, Fake Law, was also an instant bestseller. In NOTHING BUT THE TRUTH, the Secret Barrister reveals their personal story, charting their journey to the Bar and lifting the lid on life inside the Inns of Court. They also describe their transformation into a campaigner for reform, intent on exposing the lies, secrets, crises and failures of our creaking, ailing justice system.

William Atkins’s third book, EXILES, tells the story of three nineteenth-century dissidents whose lives were profoundly shaped by the winds of empire, nationalism and autocracy that continue to blow today. A masterpiece of storytelling, travel writing and imaginative empathy, it is a book about displacement, colonialism and what it means to have a home. The Moor, William’s first book, was shortlisted for the Wainwright Prize; his second, The Immeasurable World, won the Stanford Dolman Travel Writing Award and the British Library Eccles Prize. He recently guest-edited a special travel-writing edition of Granta, and his journalism and reviews have appeared in Harper’s, the Guardian and the New York Times.

Sam Knight joins us to talk about his first book, THE PREMONITIONS BUREAU, which reveals the strange, true and unsettling tale of a 1960s psychiatrist obsessed with investigating why some people seemed able to predict disaster. A story of madness and wonder, science and the supernatural, it is a journey to the outer edges of reason and the human mind. Sam is a staff writer for the New Yorker, has won two Foreign Press Association awards and was shortlisted for the 2018 Orwell Prize for political writing. His 2017 Guardian Long Read on the events that will follow the death of the Queen, ‘London Bridge is Down’, was viewed four million times.