5x15 online - October 5th with Ruby Wax, Alex Ross, Rutger Bregman

Author, comedian and mental health campaigner Ruby Wax’s newest mission is to share the green shoots of hope peeping through the soil of civilization. Distilling what she’s learned about happiness from some of the world’s most interesting innovators and thinkers, she tells us how we can take control of our over-stressed, over-critical minds and look forward to the future.

Ruby Wax OBE holds a Masters’ degree in Mindfulness-based Cognitive Therapy from Oxford University. She is the million-selling author of Sane New World, A Mindfulness Guide for the Frazzled and How to be Human, as well as the memoir, How do You Want Me?

This is poetry for now: written entirely on a phone, and unflinchingly reflecting the reality of our increasingly polarised world. From racism to the climate catastrophe, border politics to toxic masculinity, Inua Ellams – poet, performer and writer of the National Theatre’s sell out Barber Shop Chronicles – has written a collection that is as electrifying as it is powerful.

Inua Ellams was born in Nigeria in 1984 and is a performer, playwriter, graphic artist, designer and poet. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and the author of books including The Half-God of Rainfall, an epic story told in verse.

Acclaimed by the Guardian as the ‘Sapiens of 2020’, Humankind offers a revolutionary new view of human nature: one that argues people are essentially good. Providing a new perspective on the last 200,000 years of human history, bestselling author and historian Rutger Bregman (Utopia for Realists) shows how believing in kindness and altruism can change our world.

Rutger Bregman’s Utopia for Realists was translated into more than 30 languages, and his TED talk on the subject of poverty has been viewed more than three million times. He was recently ranked number 10 in the Big Issue’s Top 100 Changemakers of 2020.

This is a story about birds and fathers. About the things that run in the blood; sanity and madness; captivity and freedom. Charlie Gilmour’s biological father was the poet, anarchist and magician Heathcote Williams, a man who kept a jackdaw in his stately home and vanished from Charlie’s life in the dead of night. Many years later, a young magpie fell into Charlie’s world and, in the midst of darkness, brought a new dawn.

Charlie Gilmour lives in South London with his wife, Janina, and their daughter Olga. Featherhood has won praise from Neil Gaiman, Simon Amstell and Isabella Tree, and is Charlie’s first book.

Alex Ross’s award-winning history of twentieth-century music, The Rest is Noise, was a phenomenon, inspiring an entire festival at London’s Southbank. Now the New Yorker’s music critic has turned his attention to Wagner, weaving a tragic and riveting tale of anarchists and occultists, madmen and geniuses, that considers how art acts in the world.

Alex Ross is the author of the essay collection Listen to This, as well as The Rest is Noise, which won a National Book Critics Circle Award and the Guardian First Book Award, and was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. He has been the music critic for The New Yorker since 1996.