The Forum: The Challenge of Ageing

BBC World Service LSE Literary Festival event

The LSE and the BBC World Service present the fourth in a series of events recorded with a public audience, hosted by lawyer Helena Kennedy.

The event is part of The Forum's unique Big Five series focusing on tackling big challenges of our age: Inequality, Leadership, Ageing, the Individual versus Society, and Education. Distinguished global figures present a discussion with a panel of guests to shed fresh insight onto the big questions of our time.

Sarah Harper is professor of Gerontology at the Oxford University and director of the Oxford Institute of Population Ageing, a multi-disciplinary research unit concerned with the implications of future population change. Sarah's current research concerns globalization and global population ageing. In particular she considers the impact at the global, societal and individual level of the age-structural shift from predominantly young to predominantly older societies, addressing such questions as the implications of the widespread falls in fertility and growth in extreme longevity.

P D James was born in Oxford in 1920 and educated at Cambridge High School for Girls. From 1949 to 1968 she worked in the National Health Service and subsequently in the Home Office, first in the Police Department and later in the Criminal Policy Department. All that experience has been used in her novels. She is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and of the Royal Society of Arts and has served as a governor of the BBC, a member of the Arts Council, where she was chairman of the Literary Advisory Panel, on the Board of the British Council, and as a magistrate in Middlesex and London. She is an honorary bencher of the Honourable Society of the Inner Temple. She has won awards for crime writing in Britain, America, Italy and Scandinavia, including the Mystery Writers of America Grandmaster Award and the National Arts Club Medal of Honor for Literature (US). She has received honorary degrees from seven British universities, was awarded an OBE in 1983, and was created a life peer in 1991. In 1997 she was elected President of the Society of Authors. Her latest novel is Death Comes to Pemberley.

Helena Kennedy is one of Britain's most distinguished lawyers. She has spent her professional life giving voice to those who have least power within the system, championing civil liberties and promoting human rights. She has used many public platforms – including the House of Lords, to which she was elevated in 1997 – to argue with passion, wit and humanity for social justice. She has also written and broadcast on a wide range of issues, from medical negligence to terrorism to the rights of women and children.

Hans Rosling is a Swedish medical doctor, academic, statistician and public speaker. He is professor of International Health at Karolinska Institute and co-founder and chairman of the Gapminder Foundation, which developed the Trendalyzer software system.

Find out more about The Forum, the ideas discussion show with some of the world's most eminent minds.

This event forms part of LSE's 5th Space for Thought Literary Festival, taking place from Tuesday 25 February - Saturday 2 March 2013, with the theme 'Branching Out'.

Suggested hashtag for this event for Twitter users: #LSElitfest

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