Kate Pakenham- Executive Producer at the Donmar Warehouse explains her craft

Kate Pakenham began work as the executive producer at the Donmar Warehouse in January of this year where she now works alongside artistic director Josie Rourke - former artistic director of The Bush Theatre. Prior to taking on this role, Pakenham, a mother of two, had a long spell in television. She went on to become the producer at the Old Vic for over ten years, working alongside Sally Green and Kevin Spacey. She worked on productions such as The Norman Conquests, the Bridge Project and Cause Celebre amongst others and was also responsible for setting up the Old Vic's annual 24-Hour Plays fundraiser and New Voices network. Rourke describes Pakenham as ‘a complete touchstone, with a very pure understanding of what's great about theatre.’
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Romola Garai in a Q&A

Romola Garai is an actress best known for her roles in films such as Nicholas Nickleby (2002), Daniel Deronda (2002), I Capture the Castle (2003), Vanity fair (2004), Inside I’m Dancing (2005), Atonement (2007), The Other man (2008) and Glorious 39 (2008). She played the title role in a television adaptation of Jane Austen’s Emma in 2009, as well as playing Bel Rowley in ITV drama The Hour in 2011. She has appeared in two Royal Shakespeare Company productions playing Nina in The Seagull and Cordelia in King Lear reprising this role later for a televised version. She appeared last year in the stage play The Village Bike at the Royal Court. Romola has been nominated for a number of awards including Best Actress from the Evening Standard British Film Awards, British Supporting Actress of the Year from the London Critics Circle and a Golden Globe nomination for her performance in Emma.
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Tim Supple - directing 1001 Arabian Nights in Arabic

Tim Supple is a British theatre director who has directed and adapted theatre throughout the UK and in Europe, North and South America and the Middle and Far East. He has worked regularly at the National Theatre and Royal Shakespeare Company and was Artistic Director of the Young Vic from 1993 to 2000. In 2005 Supple launched Dash Arts to create new performance in collaboration with artists from abroad. Their production of A Midsummer Night's Dream was an international success subsequently completing two tours of India, extensive tours of the UK, Australia and North America, two seasons at Stratford-Upon-Avon and a season at the Roundhouse in London. The Guardian hailed it as: ‘the most life-enhancing production of Shakespeare’s play since Peter Brook’s.’ In 2008 Supple started work on a new theatrical adaptation of One Thousand and One Nights produced by Dash Arts. It opened in June 2011 in Toronto and had its European premier at Edinburgh International Festival in August, where the Independent hailed it as ‘an instant classic of engaged storytelling…a rediscovered literary masterpiece.’
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Kate Fleetwood star of the Bush Theatre's current show Our New Girl

Kate Fleetwood is an English actress, who has starred in a number of productions, television programmes and films and been nominated for a Tony Award for her performance in Chichester Festival Theatre's Macbeth which transferred to the West End and Broadway. At the National Theatre, her plays include, London Road and Love’s Labour’s Lost. At the RSC Kate has appeared in The Winter’s Tale, Pericles and in the West End she has starred in Macbeth and Medea. TV credits include - Casualty 1909, The Sarah-Jane Adventures, Hustle, Waking the Dead, After Thomas, Foyle’s War, Midsomer Murders, Murphy’s Law, Thin Ice, Silent Witness, Spine Chillers, The Bill, Nathan Barley, Dalziel and Pascoe, EastEnders, Holby City and Getting Hurt. Films include- Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Macbeth, Vanity Fair, Infinate World of HG Wells, The Golden Age. She is patron of En Masse Theatre.
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Che Walker- one of London's most promising playwrights

Ché Walker is a playwright, teacher, actor and theatre director. He has been awarded the George Devine Award for Most Promising Playwright; Arts Council England Writer's Award for Drama; the Peter Brook Award (Mark Marvin Award); and been Nominated for Best Musical - The Evening Standard Theatre Awards. Ché's plays include The Frontline (first at the Shakespeare's Globe), Flesh Wound (at The Royal Court); Been So Long (at The Royal Court). Television appearances include Holby City, The Office, Eastenders (10 episodes) and The Bill. He also teaches writing and acting, working often with youth clubs as well as drama schools and theatres including RADA. He has directed a great number of plays and films, recently including Estate Walls, The Oval House Theatre, (London 2010); A Mouthful of Birds, RADA, (London 2006) and Balm in Gilead, RADA, (London 2006.)
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Susannah Clapp on the genius of Angela Carter

Susannah Clapp is the literary executor for Angela Carter and Bruce Chatwin, and is the author of With Chatwin, an acclaimed portrait of Bruce Chatwin. She helped to found the London Review of Books, has worked as a publisher’s reader and editor, as the radio critic of the Sunday Times and as the theatre critic of the New Statesman. She has reviewed novels and non-fiction for the Times Literary Supplement, the New Yorker, the Sunday Times, the Observer, the London Review of Books, the New Statesman and the Independent on Sunday. She is a regular contributor to Radio 3’s Nightwaves, and has been the theatre critic of the Observer since 1997.

Angela Carter in Postcards provides a portrait of the brilliant novelist and journalist Angela Carter who died at the age of 51.
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Lila Azam Zanganeh on Nabokov and enchantment

Lila Azam Zanganeh was born in Paris to Iranian parents. After studying literature and philosophy at the Ecole Normale Supérieure, she moved to the United States to teach literature, cinema and Romance languages at Harvard University.

Since 2002, she has been a contributor to Le Monde and has been published in The New York Times, The International Herald Tribune, The Nation, The Paris Review, and La Repubblica. Her first book, The Enchanter: Nabokov and Happiness, appeared in 2011 internationally. She is currently at work on a novel titled The Orlando Inventions.

Lila is fluent in six languages and serves on the Board of Overseers of the International Rescue Committee. She is the recipient of the 2011 Roger Shattuck Prize for Criticism, awarded each year by the Center for Fiction. She writes and lives in New York City.
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Alain de Botton on Religion for Atheists

What if religions are neither all true or all nonsense? In his newest book, one of Britain's foremost philosopher's Alain de Botton argues that while the supernatural claims of religion are of course entirely false – religions still have some very important things to teach the secular world. Religion for Atheists suggests that rather than mocking religions, agnostics and atheists should instead steal from them – because they're packed with good ideas on how we might live and arrange our societies. Alain de Botton was born in Zurich, Switzerland in 1969 and now lives in London. He is a writer of essayistic books that have been described as a 'philosophy of everyday life.' He’s written on love, travel, architecture and literature. His books have been bestsellers in 30 countries. Alain also started and helps to run a school in London called The School of Life, dedicated to a new vision of education.
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Jonathan Safran Foer holds forth

Jonathan Safran Foer is an American novelist best known for his works Everything is Illuminated and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. His most recent work is Eating Animals a non-fiction argument for vegetarianism.
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Mirza Waheed on Kashmir

Mirza Waheed was born and brought up in Srinagar, Kashmir. He moved to Delhi when he was eighteen to study English literature at the University of Delhi and worked as journalist and editor in the city for four years. He came to London in 2001 to join the BBC’s Urdu Service. His debut novel The Collaborator was shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award and the Shakti Bhat Prize. It was also longlisted for the Desmond Elliott Prize.
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David Lammy on the Riots

David Lammy is the MP for Tottenham. He is the author of Out of the Ashes: Britain after the Riots. Born in Tottenham to Guyanese parents, Lammy won a scholarship to the King's School in Peterborough before going on to study law at the School of Oriental Studies in London. He also holds a Master's degree in law from Harvard University. Lammy was elected MP for Tottenham in 2000 when he was just 27. Under the Labour government, he served in a number of ministerial positions including as Minister for Culture, and as the Minister for Higher Education. Lammy was a trustee for ActionAid from 2000 to 2006 and now serves as one of its Honorary Ambassadors.
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Ben Anderson on Afghanistan

Ben Anderson, the journalist who produced, filmed and wrote The Battle for Marjah, began his career as an undercover reporter, producing exposés on topics as varied as funeral home abuses, violence among prison officers, the abuse of the mentally ill and civil war in Burma. A veteran documentarian, Anderson has presented numerous films and series for the BBC and the Discovery Channel. Highlights include Holidays in the Axis of Evil (secret travels through six countries blacklisted by the U.S. State Department), Taking on the Taliban (following a unit of British soldiers on the front lines in Afghanistan), Young, British and Angry (exploring the far-right English Defence League), The Violent Coast (a series about the conflicts along the west coast of Africa), Frontline Football (chronicling four teams from war torn nations as they try and qualify for the World Cup) and Slumdogs and Millionaires (exposing slave labour in Dubai.) He has spent the last four years concentrating on the war in Afghanistan. During his career, Anderson has won a Foreign Press Award and was twice shortlisted for the Royal Television Society Young Journalist of the Year honor and Prix Europa prizes. In addition to writing articles for the Times of London, Esquire, GQ, and other publications, Anderson is currently working on a book about his experiences in the war-torn southern provinces of Afghanistan, which will be called “No Worse Enemy.”
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John O'Farrell on comedy, Labour and forgotten wives

John O'Farrell is an author, broadcaster and comedy scriptwriter. He was a lead writer for Spitting Image from 1988 to 1993 when he left to write Have I Got News for You. In 1998, he published Things Can Only Get Better: Eighteen Miserable Years in the Life of a Labour Supporter. The book became a number one bestseller and was nominated for the George Orwell Award and the Channel 4 Political Awards. A number of other fiction and non-fiction books followed including The Best A Man Can Get, This Is Your Life and May Contain Nuts. His novels have been translated into over twenty languages, including a Japanese manga edition of The Best a Man Can Get.

In 2007, he returned to non-fiction with the publication of An Utterly Impartial History of Britain, or 2000 Years of Upper Class Idiots in Charge which went on to sell over 250,000 copies. This was followed in October 2009 by An Utterly Exasperated History of Modern Britain, or Sixty Years of Making the Same Stupid Mistakes as Always. His fourth novel The Man Who Forgot His Wife will be published in March 2012.
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Gillian Slovo on General Gordon

Gillian Slovo is a South African born playwright and novelist who has lived in England for most of her life. Her first novel, Morbid Symptoms, began a crime fiction series featuring female detective Kate Baeier. Other novels in the series include Death by Analysis, Death Comes Staccato, Catnap and Close Call. Her other novels include Ties of Blood, The Betrayal and Red Dust, a courtroom drama set in contemporary South Africa, which explores the effects of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and which was made into a film starring Hilary Swank and Chiwetel Ejiofor. Her best selling family memoir Every Secret Thing: My Family, My Country is an account of her childhood in South Africa and her relationship with her parents, both heavily involved in the anti-apartheid movement. Ice Road, set in Leningrad in 1933, explores an Arctic winter in Stalin's Russi and was shortlisted for the 2004 Orange Prize for Fiction. After this novel, Gillian published, Black Orchids, about a Sinhalese family who move to England in the 1950s. Her most recent novel is the newly published An Honourable Man which explores the mad imperial adventure of General Gordon in Khartoum. Gillian has also written two verbatim plays, the first, Guantanamo: Honor Bound to Defend Freedom with Victoria Brittain, which played world wide and her recent nationally acclaimed The Riots that started in the Tricycle Theatre before moving to the Bernie Grant Arts Centre in Tottenham. Gillian is also the President of English PEN.
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Rory Sutherland on advertising

Rory Sutherland is Vice Chairman of Ogilvy Group. He joined Ogilvy & Mather's planning department in 1988, and became a junior copywriter, working on Microsoft's account in its pre-Windows days. An early fan of the Internet, he was among the first in the traditional ad world to see the potential in these relatively unknown technologies.

An immediate understanding of the possibilities of digital technology and the Internet powered Sutherland's meteoric rise. He continues to provide insight into advertising in the age of the Internet and social media through his blog at Campaign's Brand Republic site, his column "The Wiki Man" at The Spectator and his busy Twitter account.
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Marina Lewycka - the 10 things I've found out about finance

Marina Lewycka was born in Kiel, Germany, after the war, grew up in England and lives in Sheffield. Her first novel, A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian, was shortlisted for the Orange Prize, longlisted for the Man Booker and won the Bollinger Everyman Prize for Comic Fiction and the Waverton Good Read Award. Her second novel, Two Caravans, was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize. Her new novel is Various Pets Alive and Dead.
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