5 x 15

Following on from last year’s sell-out event, five speakers from diverse backgrounds and professions battle the clock to tell the story behind their most innovative ideas, abiding passions and deepest obsessions. Each takes to the stage with just two rules: no scripts and only fifteen minutes each.

Join them as writer, literary executor and Observer theatre critic Susannah Clapp conjures the magic of Angela Carter through her picture postcards; the great Turkish author Elif Shafak tackles the creative muse; art historian/writer Martin Gayford (A Bigger Message) shares his conversations with David Hockney; and war photographer Giles Duley explores how documenting human tragedies has helped him face his own. Indian poet Tishani Doshi will be performing work from her forthcoming volume Everything begins elsewhere for the first time. Doshi's debut collection of poetry, Countries of the body , won the prestigious Forward Prize for Best First Collection. The judges called it "a work of a striking, emerging talent, who is prepared to take risks in pursuit of sensual, emotionally engaged and passionate poetry." She is also the author of The Pleasure Seekers, a novel, which was longlisted for the 2011 Orange Prize, and praised by Salman Rushdie as “a captivating, delightful novel. I was totally engaged by Tishani Doshi's people and by their world, and the language often rises - when speaking of the great matters, life, death, and above all love - to powerful metaphorical heights."