Viv Groskop

Best-selling author of How to Own the Room: Women and the Art of Brilliant Speaking (Penguin) and Lift As You Climb: Women and the Art of Ambition (Penguin). Her award-nominated podcast How to Own the Room is the biggest public speaking podcast in the world — with over a million downloads — and features interviews with Hillary Clinton, Margaret Atwood, Professor Mary Beard, Julie Andrews, Google CEO Matt Brittin, Succession’s Brian Cox and dozens more talking about public speaking, confidence and managing high-pressure situations. Her other books include The Anna Karenina Fix (Penguin) — a best-seller in translation in Russia and Finland — and Au Revoir, Tristesse (Abrams). She appears regularly on BBC TV and radio and for six years she did a run of sold-out one-woman comedy shows at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.

On BBC Radio 4 Viv has guest-presented Saturday Live, Saturday Review and Front Row. She was a regular guest on Andrew Neil’s This Week on BBC1 until the show’s demise in 2020 and she has also appeared on Woman’s Hour, Today, Newsnight, This Morning, University Challenge and Sky News. As a columnist she writes regularly for the Guardian and the Financial Times and has a regular column in Waitrose Health magazine on working life.

Viv switched from journalism to stand-up comedy in the early 2010s, performing 100 gigs in 100 consecutive nights, which led to the finals of Funny Women 2012 and to her first book I Laughed, I Cried. She has performed five one-woman shows at the Edinburgh Fringe (The Stand, Underbelly): I Laughed, I Cried (2014), Say Sorry to the Lady (2015), Be More Margo (2016), Anchorwoman (2017) and Vivalicious (2018). She has written and starred in five plays for BBC Radio 4 (produced by Big Fish Films): Read the Room (2019), Twelve Weeks (2019), A Fair Shot (2020), What He Would Have Wanted (2020) and Christmas Every Day (2021).

She is one of the most sought-after speakers for stand-up, MCing, awards hosting and keynote speaking. Keynote themes include How to Own the Room, Lift As You Climb, Women in Leadership, Female Empowerment, Authenticity and The Embrace of Failure. For all speaker enquiries, please email leo@vbqspeakers.com.

Her favourite recent gig was hosting Schitt’s Creek’s Dan Levy in front of 2,000 screaming fans at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane. Yes, she came dressed as Moira Rose. Of course!

Cariad Lloyd

Cariad Lloyd is the creator and host of the award winning podcast, Griefcast. It won Best Entertainment, Best Interview and Podcast of the Year at The British Podcast Awards 2018 and Best Podcast at the ARIA’s too. It’s been featured in The Times, The Independent, You Magazine, Radio Times, The Telegraph and The Guardian. You can follow on twitter @thegriefcast and subscribe on iTunes or listen on Acast.

You Are Not Alone

I’m still here now, all these years later. You don’t leave once you’ve joined; it’s a life membership. Grief eases and changes and returns but it never disappears.

But it will be ok, you will be ok. Somehow you will be.

You are not alone.

When Cariad was just fifteen, her dad died. She became the person-who-dad-had-died, a mess of emotions and questions; a grief-mess.

Years later, she began trying to unravel this tightly wound grief. What had happened? What effect had it all had on who she was? She started Griefcast, the podcast that talks openly, honestly and at times cheerfully about life’s most difficult moment, its end.

Inspired by her own grief mistakes and lessons, and from the profound and witty insights from her incredible guests, including Philippa Perry, Rev. Richard Coles, Isabel Allende, Nish Kumar and Marian Keyes, Cariad provides a road map for all of us. For anybody who has felt lost in grief, who wants to help someone struggling, or just wants to understand this life a little better. You are not alone.

She has appeared in shows uch as Alan Partridge, Murder in Successville and Peep Show as well asHave I Got News For You, Would I Lie To You and Qi.

She regularly pretends to be a Regency lady with my improv show, Austentatious: An Improvised Jane Austen Novel. It involves the wearing of bonnets and breeches and make up a comedy play in the style of Jane Austen. It has had five sell-out Edinburgh Festivals and is currently performing weekly in London’s West End.