Following the appreciation of the wonderful talks live-streamed from St Martins-in-the-Fields in Trafalgar Square last year, once again we are live-streaming this year’s Autumn talks. Details of these talks and information about each speaker are outlined below. Use the ‘contact us’ section of the website to register for which sessions you will attend.
These talks offer us a privileged insight into the hearts and souls of people who shape our public consciousness today, and offer us opportunities to ponder and feel gratitude for our own sources of inspiration.
Monday 9 September, 7pm: Music, Poetry and Revelation: Speakers: Lucy Winkett, Ruth Padel, Claire Gilbert
Lucy Winkett is a writer, broadcaster and Rector of St James’s Church Piccadilly. Formerly a professional musician, and Precentor of St Paul’s Cathedral in London, her publications include Our Sound is our Wound, God’s Song and Music’s Meaning and Reading the Bible with your Feet. As Chaplain to the Royal Academy of Arts, she is committed to working with artists, musicians, scientists and social activists to enable the church to place its imagination in the service of justice, as patron, collaborator and co-conspirator in making the world a more just and beautiful place.
Ruth Padel Ruth Padel is an award-winning poet with close links to Greece, India, music and wildlife conservation. Her poetry includes Learning to Make an Oud in Nazareth, on harmony and the Middle East, and We Are All from Somewhere Else, on animal and human migration. Her forthcoming collection Girl, opening with the Mysteries of Mary, explores beliefs woven around girlhood: ideas of girl as the human soul, as creative energy, and the sacred in wild nature. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and Professor of Poetry Emerita at King’s College London.
Claire Gilbert is a theologian by background, focusing on the spiritual dimension of medical and environmental ethics in her writing and lecturing. Claire was Research Fellow at the Centre of Medical Law and Ethics, King’s College, London, then National Policy Adviser to the Church of England on medical ethics and environmental ethics. She founded a charity, the Ethics Academy, she co-founded St Paul’s Institute for ethics in finance and business. She is Founder Director of Westminster Abbey Institute for Ethics in Public Life. Claire is now a full-time author, public speaker, retreat leader, consultant and mentor. She is author of the bestselling I Julian: The fictional autobiography of Julian of Norwich and Miles to Go Before I Sleep: Letters on Hope, Death and Learning to Live.
Monday 23 September, 7pm: A Quest for the Sacred: Speaker: William Dalrymple
William Dalrymple is one of Britain’s great historians and the bestselling author of the Wolfson Prize-winning White Mughals, The Last Mughal, which won the Duff Cooper Prize, and the Hemingway and Kapuscinski Prize-winning Return of a King. A frequent broadcaster, he has written and presented three television series, one of which won the Grierson Award for Best Documentary Series at BAFTA. He has also won the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award, the Sunday Times Young British Writer of the Year Award, the Foreign Correspondent of the Year at the FPA Media Awards, and been awarded five honorary doctorates. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, the Royal Asiatic Society and the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and has held visiting fellowships at Princeton and Brown. He writes regularly for the New York Review of Books, the New Yorker and the Guardian. In 2018 he was presented with the prestigious President’s Medal by the British Academy for his outstanding literary achievement and for co-founding the Jaipur Literature Festival. He is the co-host of chart-topping podcast Empire with Anita Anand. William lives with his wife and three children on a farm outside Delhi. His latest book The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World is published this September 2024.
Monday 30 September, 7pm Monday, 28th October: Theatre – Innovation, Access and Community: Speaker: Kwame Kwei-Armah
Due to unforeseen circumstances, the lecture Theatre – Innovation, Access and Community by Kwame Kwei-Armah, has had to be rescheduled from the original date of Monday 30th September to the new date of Monday 28th October.
Kwame Kwei-Armah OBE is Artistic Director of the Young Vic Theatre and Artistic Advisor at Manhattan Theatre Club in New York. He was previously Artistic Director of Baltimore Center Stage (2011-18) and Artistic Director of the Festival of Black Arts and Culture, Senegal (2010), where he wrote and directed the opening ceremony at Senghor stadium. As a playwright, Kwame was the first black Briton to have a play produced in London’s commercial West End (Elmina’s Kitchen). His triptych of plays was produced at the National Theatre, where he later created the online resource The Black Play Archive.
Kwame was Chancellor of the University of the Arts, London (2010-2015), is Patron of Ballet Black and The Black Cultural Archives, Chair of Warwick Arts Centre Advisory Board and a Trustee of the Tate and the founding Trustee Black Equity Organisation. Kwame was awarded an OBE for Services to Drama in 2011, and in 2020 listed as one of 100 Great Black Britons.
Monday 7 October, 7pm: Moments of Truth: Speaker: Revd Sam Wells
Sam Wells is Vicar of St Martin-in-the-Fields, where he leads a unique configuration of commercial, cultural and charitable initiatives, rooted in a vibrant congregational life. He is also a widely known preacher, broadcaster and author. He spent ten years in areas of significant deprivation in Newcastle and Norwich in the early part of his ministry, helping to found the first development trust in the East of England in 1999. From 2005-12 he occupied one of the most prominent pulpits in the US, as Dean of Duke University Chapel. He was also Research Professor of Christian Ethics at Duke Divinity School. He appears regularly on ‘Thought for the Day’ on Radio 4’s Todayprogramme. He has published 47 books, including scholarly works on ethics, studies in ministry, liturgy, discipleship and preaching. In 2022 he completed his trilogy Walk Humbly, Love Mercy and Act Justly and published Humbler Faith, Bigger God: Finding a Faith to Live By, which takes the most profound criticisms of Christianity and the church as the pretexts for finding a truer, more honest trust in God. His books have been translated into several languages. He is also Visiting Professor of Christian Ethics at King’s College London. He was a member of the Multi-Stakeholder Council, part of the intergovernmental G20 process, from 2018-20.
Monday 14 October, 7pm: Aid Lecture: Genocide and Other International Crimes: Protecting the Individual and the Group Now and Tomorrow: Speaker: Philippe Sands KC
Philippe Sands KC FRSL FBA is Professor of the Public Understanding of Law at University College London Faculty of Laws and Samuel and Judith Pisar Visiting Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. He is a practising barrister at 11 King’s Bench Walk (11KBW) and appears as counsel before the International Court of Justice and other international courts and tribunals. He sits as an arbitrator in international investment disputes and the Court of Arbitration for Sport.
He is author of Lawless World (2005) and Torture Team (2008) and numerous academic books on international law, and has contributed to the New York Review of Books, Vanity Fair, the Financial Times, The Guardian and the New York Times. Sands lectures around the world and has taught at New York University and been a visiting professor at the University of Toronto, the University of Melbourne, and the Université de Paris I (Sorbonne). He appears regularly on the BBC and CNN.
His most recent books are East West Street: On the Origins of Crimes Against Humanity and Genocide (2016) (awarded the 2016 Baillie Gifford Prize, the 2017 British Book Awards Non-Fiction Book of the Year, and the 2018 Prix Montaigne) and The Ratline: Love, Lies and Justice on the Trail of a Nazi Fugitive (2020), also available as BBC and France Culture podcasts. His latest book is The Last Colony: A Tale of Exile, Justice and Britain’s Colonial Legacy (2022).
Philippe was President of English PEN for five years until April 2023 and is a member of the Board of the Hay Festival of Arts and Literature.
Monday 21 October, 7pm: Soul Friends: Speaker: Rowan Williams
Rowan Williams is world-renowned as a theologian and writer and for his wisdom, grace and spiritual insight. He spent much of his earlier career as an academic at the universities of Cambridge and Oxford successively. He was Archbishop of Wales before becoming Archbishop of Canterbury 2002-2012. He was then Master of Magdalene College Cambridge, and Chair of Christian Aid. He has been a fellow of the British Academy since 1990 and has published many books including studies of Arius, Teresa of Avila, Sergei Bulgakov and Fyodor Dostoyevsky, together with writings and lectures on a wide range of theological, historical and political themes. He continues to lecture, write and speak widely and his thinking and example is an inspirational expression of faith for our times. His latest books are The Way of St. Benedict (2020), A Century of Poetry – 100 Poems for Searching the Heart (2022), and Passions of the Soul (2024) which he says is about ‘Learning how to live in heaven by learning how to live on earth, in the body, in the moment.’
Monday 4 November, 7pm: Living with the Gods: Speaker: Neil MacGregor
Neil MacGregor is a British cultural historian, broadcaster and writer. He grew up in Glasgow, studied Modern Languages at Oxford then History of Art at the Courtauld Institute. He edited The Burlington Magazine before becoming, in 1987, Director of the National Gallery in London. During his tenure there he fought to maintain free public access to great paintings and made a number of BBC television series touching on works in the collection including the highly acclaimed Seeing Salvation: Images of Christ in Art.
From 2002-2015 he was Director of the British Museum. In that time, he wrote and presented several influential books and series for BBC Radio 4. His continuing preoccupation has been to make available to the widest public objects and stories that make sense of the world, take us into the minds of others, and reveal the ways in which our apparently discrete histories interconnect. In 2017 he wrote and presented a thirty part BBC Radio 4 series Living with the Gods.
From 2015 to 2018 MacGregor was Founding Director of the Humboldt Forum, Berlin. In 2018 he was chair of the Booker Prize. He is now International Advisor to the J. Paul Getty Foundation in Los Angeles and to the CSMVS Museum in Mumbai. At the end of 2021 he held the Chaire du Louvre at the Musée du Louvre in Paris.
Monday 11 November, 7pm: An African History of Africa: Speaker: Zeinab Badawi
Zeinab Badawi is an award winning broadcaster, journalist and filmmaker. She is President of SOAS, University of London, and is an honorary fellow of her alma mater, St Hilda’s College, Oxford. Born in Sudan she has worked in the British media for several decades. Zeinab is a recipient of the President’s Medal of the British Academy, a Patron of the United Nations Association UK and on the boards of Arts, Humanities and Research Council, MINDS (the Mandela Institute for Development Studies), the International Crisis Group and Afrobarometer. She was previously chair of the Royal African Society. In her inspirational new book An African History of Africa, Zeinab Badawi guides us through Africa’s spectacular history from the very origins of the species, through ancient civilisations and remarkable kings and queens to the miseries of conquest and the elation of independence. Visiting more than thirty different countries to write her book she unearths through the voices of Africans themselves the buried epic histories of the oldest inhabited continent on the planet.
Monday 18 November, 7pm: People and Ideas: Speaker: Zadie Smith
Zadie Smith is the author of the novels White Teeth, The Autograph Man, On Beauty, NW, Swing Time, and The Fraud (2023) as well as three collections of essays, Changing My Mind, Feel Free and Intimations, and a collection of short stories, Grand Union.
White Teeth won multiple awards, including the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, the Whitbread First Novel Award and the Guardian First Book Award. On Beauty was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and won the Orange Prize for Fiction, and NW was shortlisted for the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction.
‘“Fiction”, Smith argues, is “a medium that must always allow itself… the possibility of expressing intimate and inconvenient truths.” Her stories are full of those truths, whether she’s imagining an immigrant living in servitude in London, villagers held hostage by armed strangers, British tourists drifting down a lazy river, or an unrepentant Billie Holiday near the end of her life.’ (New Yorker)
Zadie Smith is currently a tenured professor of fiction at New York University and a Member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She is a regular contributor to the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books.
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