A Between the Lines conversation about finding hope, taking action and imagining a better future with journalist and author Caitlin Moran

Caitlin Moran on How to be Hopeful

Thursday, 29 October 2026

6:30-7:30pm

RSA House and online via YouTube

It can be hard to imagine a better future when the present feels so uncertain. From climate anxiety and political polarisation to endless bad news and online arguments, it’s easy to feel that the world is getting worse - and that there’s little we can do about it. So how do we find our way back to hope?

Bestselling author, journalist and broadcaster Caitlin Moran joins us for a Between the Lines conversation about her new book, How to Be Hopeful - a funny, candid and deeply personal exploration of what it means to choose hope when the world gives us plenty of reasons not to.

After reaching what she calls "Peak Despair”, Moran set herself a challenge: could she stay in the same house, the same neighbourhood and the same messy modern world, and still find a way to make things better?

Rather than trying to escape it all, she embarked on a year-long experiment in everyday action. She stepped back from the noise of social media and rolling news, reconnected with her community, picked litter, donated blood, rewilded her garden and began asking where our modern anxiety comes from - and what we can actually do about it.

How to Be Hopeful is the story of what happened next, and of Moran’s discovery that hope isn’t simply something we wait to feel. It can be something we practise - through attention, connection, community and small acts that make a difference.

Join Caitlin Moran live at the Royal Society of Arts for a timely conversation about finding hope - and acting on it - when the future feels uncertain. With her trademark wit and honesty, she asks a deceptively simple question: what might it mean not just to feel hopeful, but to do hopeful?

Caitlin Moran will be signing copies of How to Be Hopeful after the event. Copies will be available to purchase on the evening.

Caitlin Moran:

Caitlin Moran is the eldest of eight children, home-educated on a council estate in Wolverhampton. She published her first novel at 16 and became a columnist at The Times at 18. She has won Columnist of the Year seven times and has also been named Interviewer and Critic of the Year. Her million-selling, groundbreaking feminist memoir, How to Be a Woman, was voted one of the Sunday Times’ ‘Most Important Books of the Twenty-First Century’. Her subsequent five books were all Sunday Times Number 1 Bestsellers, and she adapted her novel How To Build A Girl into a 2020 movie, starring Beanie Feldstein, Alfie Allen, Paddy Considine and Emma Thompson. Her Who’s Who entry lists her interests as 'cava, eyeliner, hair embiggening, and The Struggle'. She lives in North London with her husband and two children, and, after following all her own advice, she really is hopeful now.

Between the Lines:

Before ideas change the world, they change minds. The stories we tell - and the ways we make sense of them - shape what we believe is possible, whose voices are heard, and how we understand one another.

Between the Lines is a series of conversations with writers, artists and thinkers exploring the power of ideas and narrative to reveal hidden truths, challenge how we see the world and imagine different futures. Together, they ask: what might we see, imagine and create if we told different stories?

Image credit: Supplied

Description supplied by the event organiser.