Ctrl Alt Delete

In this very special live episode of Ctrl Alt Delete, I interviewed the brilliant bestselling author Dolly Alderton on writing, friendship, saying no to people-pleasing and in general we had a GOOD OL' NATTER. Thanks to everyone for coming along, to Rosie for organising the logistics at Waterstones Tottenham Court Road (and for providing the amazing Dolly cocktail) and Shola for producing.

Dolly Alderton's glorious memoir, Everything I Know About Love, has been in the top 5 Sunday Times bestseller charts for months, she vividly recounts wrestling with self-sabotage, getting drunk, getting dumped, and realising that that your mates are always there at the end of every messy night out. It’s a book – above all else – about recognising that you and you alone are enough.

Hope you enjoy this one!

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Today's guest is Harriet Hall is Stylist's Head of Digital Features and Author of SHE: A Celebration of Renegade Women.

Harri specialises in fashion and feminism, and edits the Stylist Ask a Feminist column. Her book SHE: A Celebration of Renegade Women is available on Amazon and all good books shops. SHE is a love letter to all the women who have thrown out the rulebook and threatened the status quo. It's a toast to the brave, bold and brilliant women who make us proud.

We talk about the process of what happens when an editor commission you to write a book without a literary agent, dealing with trolls and branded feminism.

Hope you enjoy this one!

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Reni Eddo-Lodge is an award winning journalist, author, and podcaster.

Her debut non-fiction book, Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race was published in summer 2017 to critical acclaim.

She also has a new podcast out which you can find on iTunes! You can listen to it now, it’s called About Race with Reni Eddo-Lodge and launched in March 2018.

Her book instantly became a Sunday Times bestseller and won the 2018 Jhalak Prize. It has also been shortlisted for a British Book Award in the category of narrative non-fiction. The book earned a spot on the longlist for the prestigious Baillie Gifford Prize for non-fiction, and was shortlisted for the Books Are My Bag Readers Awards (non-fiction). It was voted non-fiction book of the year for 2017 by booksellers at both Foyles and Blackwells , and selected by actress Emma Watson as an Our Shared Shelf book pick.

We forgot to reference a few names when quoting, so here they are:

-Reni quoted Malcolm Gladwell "3 people" in the Tipping Point.

-I quoted Lauren Bravo's "quotas analogy are like Invisalyn braces" tweet.

Huge thank you to producers Shola Aleje and Marcus Hessenberg and Mark and Elizabeth from Waterstones Gower St for being amazing.

Enjoy! 

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Clover Stroud is a journalist and award-winning author.

We chatted a lot before the episode, I felt like I'd met Clover before. I think that's what happens when you read so much about someone's life in a book. We met at Hodder (our shared publisher) and we really did just jump straight into it from the minute I pressed record. Clover is such an articulate, warm, brilliant person in person. Her unique and beautiful voice shines all the way through her memoir.

Clover’s book The Wild Other is my favourite memoir of last year. A memoir that stays with you with so long afterwards, it is warm, it is sad, it is hopeful.

The book is about Clover Stroud's idyllic childhood in rural country - which was then shattered when Clover was 16 a horrific riding accident left her mother permanently brain-damaged.

The memoir is Clover’s journey to dealing with everything. It’s a memoir of travel and adventure too - travels to Ireland, to the rodeos of Texas and then to Russia's war-torn Caucasus, Clover eventually found her way back home.

The Wild Other is a grippingly honest account of love, loss, family and the healing strength of nature.

“Clover Stroud is a force of nature, and a woman who is fearless in the face of life and death. I loved it." - Elizabeth Gilbert

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Stacey Dooley is one of Britain’s most loved documentary presenters. In her series Stacey Dooley Investigates she has looked at a variety of topics from sex trafficking and underage sex slavery and the dark side of tourism in Thailand and Kenya – all of which have had amazing reviews. In 2015 Stacey presented a BBC3 documentary looking at domestic abuse in the UK in Beaten By My Boyfriend and prime time, three-part series for BBC3 lifting the lid on the global war on drugs culminating in Cannabis Smugglers.

Stacey immersed herself in different groups with extreme ideologies and beliefs in her most recent two part series Brainwashing Stacey Dooley for BBC3 last year and in 2016, Stacey travelled to Syria and presented the critically acclaimed documentary, Stacey Dooley on The Frontline: Gun Girls and ISIS, also for BBC3.

Many of Stacey’s docs have won the title of ‘Most Watched Documentaries’ on BBC iPlayer. And if she doesn't sound busy enough, she also released her debut Sunday Times Bestselling book this year called On the Front Line with the Women Who Fight Back which documents just some of the amazing women she’s encountered in the past ten years of her career. We talk about the book and her career making documentaries in this episode. Love this episode! I fell even more in love with Stacey and you will too.

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Today's guest is Elina Berglund, a particle physicist and app entrepreneur.

She was part of the Nobel Prize-winning team that discovered Higgs Boson particle, an amazing achievement. After that, she left her job to co-found and develop the NaturalCycles algorithm and app - a prototype she had already been using herself.

I've been quite intrigued by Natural Cycles "the first ever contraceptive app" and wanted to interview Elina for the podcast all inventing an algorithm and also being a scientist. I haven't used the app myself, but the link between contraception and tech got me very intrigued.

Natural Cycles is the only certified contraceptive app personalised with data from your unique cycle. It has has been certified in the EU to be marketed as a contraceptive device like the pill or the coil.

You measure your temperature first thing in the morning before you get out of bed. This reading is an indirect measure of your hormone levels and the information the app needs to effectively analyse your cycle and calculate your red or green day.

Natural Cycles is backed by a unique algorithm that takes your temperature and many other factors like sperm survival, temperature fluctuations and cycle irregularities into account. It not only detects ovulation, fertility and the different stages of your cycle, it also calculates accurate predictions for upcoming cycles. It has been clinically tested to be highly accurate in detecting and predicting ovulation.

Just worth keeping in mind that Natural Cycles does not protect against Sexually Transmitted Infections (STIs) in any way.

Hope you enjoy the episode! As Elina is based in Sweden, this episode is over the phone.

*This bonus episode is in collaboration with Natural Cycles*

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My guest today is Trinny Woodall, author, fashion advisor and beauty entrepreneur.

You may know her from the hugely popular Trinny and Susannah makeover days. Her and Susannah met in 1994 and wrote a weekly fashion column for The Daily Telegraph. This led to the launch of their own fashion-advice business and first book.

They were then commissioned by the BBC to host What Not to Wear in 2001. The following year they released their second book with the same name as the show What Not to Wear. In total they co-wrote eleven style advice books, many of which became hugely successfully best-sellers in the UK and America.

They co-hosted What Not to Wear for five series and appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show as style and make-over advisors, Trinny still makes regular appearances on ITV’s This Morning show as their fashion style expert.

In this episode we talk about the launch of her Trinny London make-up range, her new Facebook show, how your career can move in cycles, and why she doesn’t do sponsored posts.

(ps. I am loving the Trinny London make-up, they come in little metal pots that you can stack together and it’s super simple. If you’re a fan of Glossier, you’ll really like Trinny’s range. It’s creamy, effective and easy to use. I love it because I can use it quickly when I’m running late!)

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This is a live recorded one-off episode, hosted in Jigsaw's London Piccadilly store, all about working in the creativity industries from the perspectives of three generations of creative women. I invited Charly Cox (poet, Gen Z), Serena Guen (founder of Suitcase, Millennial) and Lucia White (Head of design at Jigsaw, Gen X) to talk abut the highs, lows and lessons of getting paid to be creative.

This month, Jigsaw is launching their “creativity doesn’t discriminate” campaign, to champion women leaders in the creativity industry, through film, photography, prose and art. Government statistics show that women are still under-represented in the creative industries in the UK - there's never been a more important time to champion creative women.

In collaboration with Kodak, Jigsaw are re-launching a 125 year-old campaign – Kodak Girl – into the modern era to celebrate new creative talent. The collaboration - now called Kodak Woman (she has grown up!) - will be supported by a capsule collection of T-shirts and sweatshirts. 

Check out Jigsaw's blog, where they are showcasing young female talent across the UK: https://www.jigsaw-online.com/blog

Thanks to those who came along to listen to this special in-store recording, shopped, and had prossecco!

Here are some things we spoke about:

- How does social media impact our creativity?

- How can a branded campaign stand the test of time?

- How do you deal with people who don't believe in you?

- How can we make money and still remain creatively pure?

- How can be help the younger generations to get into the creative industry?

- How commercially-minded do you want to be?

- How do you switch off from an all-encompassing creative role?

*This was event was in partnership with Jigsaw*

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Ava Duvernay is an Oscar-nominated film director. Ava made her feature film debut with the documentary This in the Life (2008), a history on the hip hop movement in Los Angeles in the 1990's. This was followed by series of television music documentaries and her first narrative feature film, I Will Follow (2010), secured her the African-American Film Critics Association award for best screenplay. Her follow-up, Middle of Nowhere (2012) won the Best Director Prize at the 2012 Sundance film festival, making her the first African-American woman to receive the award.

Fast forward to the last few years, she is best know for her work directing Selma (2014), Ava was the first black female director to be nominated for a Golden Globe Award. With Selma, she was also the first black female director to have her film nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture. In 2017, she was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature for her film 13th

Her latest film, out now, is the 2018 fantasy film A Wrinkle in Time, which has a mega cast of Reese Witherspoon, Mindy Kaling and Oprah, and had a budget exceeding $100 million. She is amazing. I hope you love this episode as much as I do.

Some of the favourite quotes from the episode:

“I didn’t pick up a camera until I was 32 years old.”

“I had made 13th and I had made Selma, and that was really dark subject matter, and just to make something about lightness and joy and black girls flying, and designing talking flowers, brought me joy.”

“What do we treat each other so poorly? How broken are we?”

“I reject the word workaholic. I work all the time but I love what i do, and to not do it would make me less happy.”

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Jerico Mandybur is the editorial director at GIRLBOSS MEDIA. We recorded it in LA in the GIRLBOSS offices. You might have read the book GIRLBOSS by Sophia Amoruso (the original founder of Nasty Gal) which was a New York Times bestseller in 2014. Jerico is currently the editorial director of Girlboss media.

I had the best time in LA! thank you to Air New Zealand for my flight and Visit California for the most amazing trip. There's lots of content going on my site in the next few weeks.

So back to Girlboss Media - it was founded for women redefining success on their own terms. It was also founded by Sophia Amoruso. Girlboss Media was born from the Girlboss book that inspired a generation of women to take action in their own lives.

We talk about Jerico's career journey up to now: she previously held senior positions at sites like Mashable (a huge online tech magazine), Oyster Magazine, MTV and ASOS.

Jerico also hosts of the podcast Self Service, and weekly guest on Girlboss Radio. Self Service is the second show to launch on Girlboss Radio. It’s described as your cosmic comfort zone where self-care is celebrated, they get real about emotions, have thoughtful, funny conversations, and astrology is discussed in a fun way.

We have a great chat about podcasting, work, astrology and imposter syndrome.

Fave quotes from the episode:

“I think there’s a huge tradition in Western Culture of dismissing anything that goes against materialist rationalist White Male Thought.”

“We really want to give equal weight to work and wellness.”

“Why hustle if you feel like shit? You need to feel good, to do good.”

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