We’re starting the New Year with a sparkling celebration of the arts. Join us for an immersive evening that will take us from Glasgow to Madrid to sixteenth-century Amsterdam, as we celebrate works on canvas, on the page and on the screen.

Douglas Stuart won the 2020 Booker Prize for his first novel Shuggie Bain heralded as a ‘masterpiece’ by the Washington Post. He was born in Glasgow and studied at the Royal College of Art and he subsequently moved to New York to pursue a career in design. Shuggie Bain, is an immersive, panoramic portrait of 1980s Glasgow and the love between an alcoholic mother and her son.

Max Porter is author of the acclaimed books Lanny and Grief is the Thing With Feathers; in 2016 he was also the recipient of the Sunday Times / Peters Fraser + Dunlop Young Writer of the Year award. In the incandescent The Death of Francis Bacon, he imagines the painter’s last days in a Madrid hospital and translates seven of Bacon’s greatest pictures into searingly visceral prose.

Stephen Daldry is an award-winning theatre, film and television director and producer. His productions have won multiple Olivier & Tony awards and he has directed 5 major feature films, including Billy Elliot. In 2021 he is producing The Walk featuring ‘Little Amal’, a 3.5 metre-tall puppet of a young Syrian refugee girl, created by Handspring Puppet Company. Little Amal will walk across Turkey, Greece, Italy, France, Switzerland, Germany, Belgium and the UK to focus attention on the urgent needs of young refugees.

Amir Nizar Zuabi is Artistic director of The Walk. He is an award-winning theatre writer and director. He was an associate director of the Young Vic, a member of the United Theaters Europe for artistic achievement, and an alumni of The Sundance Institute Theatre Program.

Kate Mosse is a number one international bestselling author and Founder Director of the Women’s Prize for Fiction. The City of Tears is the epic and gripping second novel in The Burning Chambers series, and takes us from sixteenth-century France to the ‘City of Tears’ itself, Amsterdam.

Thank-you for your generous support for 5x15.