5x15: Lindsey Hilsum, Tracey Thorn, Michael Morpurgo, Chris McDougall, John Crace

5x15 talks, Tabernacle 
Once you understand what 5x15 is, it’s a delightfully straightforward name. Try telling your friends that they should go to a 5x15 night, however, and they will assume you're plugging some kind of mathele event. 
Actually, 5x15 is a literary sushi bar, in which hundreds of different ideas are conveyed past the audience and the most appealing are picked-up and savoured. It is an unscripted evening in which five well-known speakers must tell you a story, plan a theory or reveal something about their lives in the course of fifteen minutes.
On May 18, the intellectual delicacies up for grabs come from the minds of Lindsey Hilsum, Tracey Thorn, Michael Morpurgo, Chris McDougall and John Crace. These five high-profile speakers will be exploring their own passions, obsessions and stories of adventure - laying them out before an intellectually hungry audience.
5x15 talk London: the speakers
Lindsey Hilsum is Channel 4 News’ International Editor and the author of Sandstorm; Libya in the Time of Revolution. Her astonishing career includes being the only English-speaking foreign correspondent in Rwanda when the genocide started, being embedded with a frontline marine unit during the 2004 US assault on Fallujah and reporting the uprisings in Egypt, Bahrain and Libya during the 2011 Arab Spring. She has also reported from Syria, eastern Ukraine and Mali in recent years.
She will be in conversation with Tracey Thorn, singer and songwriter with Everything But the Girl until 2000, who wrote and recorded the original music for ‘The Falling’ in 2013: the debut feature film by filmmaker Carol Morley.
The three other speakers include former Children’s laureate and best-selling author Michael Morpurgo, creator of over 130 books for children, including Private Peaceful, The Butterfly Lion, Censure’s Kingdom and the famous War Horse, that has been performed to packed theatres since 2007.
The fourth guest, arriving from his home in rural Pennsylvania where he lives and writes among Amish farms, is Christopher McDougall the author of Born to Run: The hidden tribe, the ultra-runners, and the Greatest Race the World has Never Seen and Natural Born Heroes: The Lost Secrets of Strength and Endurance. He began his career as an overseas correspondent for the Associated Press, covering wars in Rwanda and Angola.
Finally, John Crace, the Parliamentary sketch and staff feature writer at the Guardian will be joining them. He writes the literary pastiche Digested Read for G2 and is the author of several books including Vertigo: One Football Fan’s Fear of Success and soon-to-be released Harry’s Games: Inside the Mind of Harry Redknapp. His recent books include I Never Promised You a Rose Garden: A Short Guide to Modern Politics, the Coalition and the General Election.