English: Blood! Sex! Crime! On Why We Devour Sensationalism

Drawing inspiration from the Breaking the News exhibition, this conversation gets under the skin of the darker side of news, examining our ongoing appetite and asking whether it obscures the view of those on the inside of the story.

Shrabani Basu is a journalist and Sunday Times best-selling author. Her books include the critically acclaimed Mystery of the Parsee Lawyer: Arthur Conan Doyle, George Edalji and the Case of the Foreigner in the English Village, For King and Another Country; Victoria & Abdul (now a major motion picture,) and Spy Princess: The Life of Noor Inayat Khan.

Hallie Rubenhold is a bestselling author, social historian, broadcaster and historical consultant for TV and film. Her book The Five was a Sunday Times Bestseller, won the Baillie-Gifford Prize for Non-fiction, and has been optioned as a drama series. Her other works include The Covent Garden Ladies, on the true story of a notorious guidebook to Georgian London’s prostitutes, and Lady Worsley’s Whim about the 18th century’s most infamous adultery trial.

Graeme Macrae Burnet is the author of The Disappearance of Adèle Bedeau, the Man Booker shortlisted His Bloody Project, The Accident on the A35 and CASE STUDY. His Bloody Project which is ‘a novel on which Robert Louis Stevenson might have bestowed envy,’ (Robert McCrum) and has been published in over 20 languages. Graeme was named Author of the Year in the Sunday Herald Culture Awards 2017.

Tamara Tubb is Project Curator in the British Library’s News, Radio and Moving Image team, and is one of the curators for the Breaking the News exhibition. Her research interests include celebrity throughout the ages, early modern textual cultures and the 21st century news environment. Before joining the Library in 2016, Tamara worked as a teacher, researcher and digital media executive.

Bee Rowlatt works in the British Library's Cultural Events team. Her In Search of Mary (2015) was a ‘biography of the year’ (Independent) and she co-wrote the bestselling Talking about Jane Austen in Baghdad (2010) which was dramatised by the BBC. She is one of Virago’s Fifty Shades of Feminism.