5x15

TED Prize-winner and Global Witness co-founder Charmian Gooch addresses corruption.

Charmian Gooch is co-founder and director of Global Witness, a non-profit campaigning organisation that addresses the links between natural resource exploitation and the funding of conflict and corruption. She jointly led Global Witness's first campaign, exposing the trade in timber between the Khmer Rouge and Thai logging companies and their political and military backers. Subsequently, Charmian developed and launched Global Witness’s ground-breaking campaign to combat ‘blood diamonds;’ Global Witness was nominated for the 2003 Nobel Peace Prize as a result of this work. In 2014 Charmian was awarded the TED Prize, given to an ‘extraordinary individual with a creative and bold vision to spark global change’. Also in 2014, Global Witness received the Skoll Award for Social Entrepreneurship, awarded to ‘transformative leaders who are disrupting the status quo’.

5x15 brings together five outstanding individuals to tell of their lives, passions and inspirations. There are only two rules - no scripts and only 15 minutes each.

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Novelist Akhil Sharma tells of prayer and his family life.

Akhil Sharma was born in Delhi in India and emigrated to the USA in 1979. His stories have been published in the New Yorker and in Atlantic Monthly, and have been included in The Best American Short Stories and O. Henry Prize Collections. His first novel, An Obedient Father, won the 2001 Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award. He was named one of Granta's 'Best of Young American Novelists' in 2007. His second novel, Family Life, won The 2015 Folio Prize and the International Dublin Literary Award 2016. Sharma is currently a Fellow at The New York Public Library's Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers.

5x15 brings together five outstanding individuals to tell of their lives, passions and inspirations. There are only two rules - no scripts and only 15 minutes each.

Learn more about 5x15 events: 5x15stories.com

Twitter: www.twitter.com/5x15stories

Facebook: www.facebook.com/5x15stories

Instagram: www.instagram.com/5x15stories

Poet Jackie Kay takes us on a journey through her past, along the red dust road.

Jackie is the Scots Makar and Chancellor of the University of Salford. Jackie Kay was born in Edinburgh, Scotland in 1961 to a Scottish mother and a Nigerian father. She was adopted at birth and was brought up in Glasgow, studying at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama and Stirling University where she read English. The experience of being adopted by and growing up withing a white family inspired her first collection of poetry, The Adoption Papers. Her first novel, Trumpet was awarded the Guardian Fiction Prize. Inspired by the life of musician Billy Tipton, the novel tells the story of Scottish jazz trumpeter Joss Moody whose death revealed that he was, in fact, a woman. Her dramatised poem, The Lamplighter was shortlisted for the 2009 Saltire Society Scottish Book of the Year Award. Her Maw Broon Monologues, performed at the Tron Theatre in Glasgow, and combining rhythmic verse and music, were shortlisted for the 2010 Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry. Red Dust Road (2010), a memoir about meeting her Nigerian birth father, was shortlisted for the 2011 PEN/Ackerley Prize. In 2006, she was awarded an MBE for services to literature.

5x15 brings together five outstanding individuals to tell of their lives, passions and inspirations. There are only two rules - no scripts and only 15 minutes each.

Learn more about 5x15 events: 5x15stories.com

Twitter: www.twitter.com/5x15stories

Facebook: www.facebook.com/5x15stories

Instagram: www.instagram.com/5x15stories

William Dalrymple tells stories from Afghanistan.

William Dalrymple is an award winning historian as well as a broadcaster, critic and art historian. In 1986, while still at college, he set off to follow on foot the outward route of Marco Polo from Jerusalem to Mongolia and wrote a highly acclaimed bestseller about the journey, In Xanadu, when he was twenty-two. The book won the 1990 Yorkshire Post Best First Work Award and a Scottish Arts Council Spring Book Award. He followed this up with City of Djinns (1994), From the Holy Mountain (1997) and The Age of Kali (1998). In 1999 he changed genres and began writing history books. White Mughals was published in 2003 winning the Wolfson Prize and the Scottish Book of the Year Prize.

Recorded live in London in 2014.

5x15 brings together five outstanding individuals to tell of their lives, passions and inspirations. There are only two rules - no scripts and only 15 minutes each.

Learn more about 5x15 events: 5x15stories.com

Twitter: www.twitter.com/5x15stories

Facebook: www.facebook.com/5x15stories

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William Fiennes on founding the charity First Story, and his passion to foster creativity and literacy. The charity runs writing workshops in schools across the country, hoping to encourage that revelatory process of 'finding one's own voice.' Fiennes thinks that we all have our own unique voice, and he quotes Pullman on the importance of discovering it: "Real writing can liberate and strengthen young people's sense of themselves as almost nothing else can." William Fiennes is the bestselling author of The Snow Geese and The Music Room.

Recorded live in London at 5x15 in 2014.

5x15 brings together five outstanding individuals to tell of their lives, passions and inspirations. There are only two rules - no scripts and only 15 minutes each.

Learn more about 5x15 events: 5x15stories.com

Twitter: www.twitter.com/5x15stories

Facebook: www.facebook.com/5x15stories

Instagram: www.instagram.com/5x15stories

Actor Ian Kelly shows us the lesser-known side of the infamous lothario Casanova.

Ian Kelly is an award winning actor and writer whose works include Casanova (Sunday Times Biography of the Year) and most recently Mr Foote's Other Leg, (Winner, Theatre Book of the Year 2012). As an actor, Ian is perhaps best known from the National Theatre/Broadway hit The Pitmen Painters and the Harry Potter films as Hermione's father.

Recorded live at 5x15 in January 2014.

5x15 brings together five outstanding individuals to tell of their lives, passions and inspirations. There are only two rules - no scripts and only 15 minutes each.

Learn more about 5x15 events: 5x15stories.com

Twitter: www.twitter.com/5x15stories

Facebook: www.facebook.com/5x15stories

Instagram: www.instagram.com/5x15stories

Joanna Lumley talks about her idea for a garden bridge across London, which is being developed with Thomas Heatherwick.

Joanna Lumley is one of Britain's favourite actresses. Her break through role came as Purdy in The New Avengers. However it was Joanna's role as the chain-smoking Patsy in the award-winning Absolutely Fabulous which brought her renewed fame. Joanna is known for her support for Gurkhas, the exiled Tibetan people and government, the Kondha indigenous people of India, and the Prospect Burma charity which offers grants to Burmese students.

Recorded live at 5x15 in London January 2014.

5x15 brings together five outstanding individuals to tell of their lives, passions and inspirations. There are only two rules - no scripts and only 15 minutes each.

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