About this Event
Ten Lives
A revelatory exploration of the ways in which wealth - and the lack of it - shapes our lives, told through the stories of ten people, from award-winning data journalist and artist Mona Chalabi.
Anna has a comfortable life in a beautiful house thanks to her husband - until he suddenly asks for a divorce. Kristina faces a choice between raising her child and finishing her degree; growing other people's babies afforded her a way out. Tiffany, meanwhile, earns so little that the farm which is her greatest source of reassurance is also her greatest source of stress. Then there's Jacob: he earns vast sums in finance, and yet he's less concerned with what he has than with what he has to lose.
Ten people, ten different incomes, all of them somehow afraid. For five years, data journalist Mona Chalabi followed their lives, documenting how wealth shaped their feelings, choices, identities and insecurities. Exposing our various delusions and our universal trappedness, her arresting account of what she discovered asks how much is actually enough to be - and feel - safe? And can we ever know how much we need, or what we owe one another, until we are more honest about what we have?
Interwoven with the data visualisations for which Chalabi is renowned, as well as her own dramatic journey through sudden wealth and back again, Ten Lives reveals, with disarming candour, what we try so hard to hide from one another. And it shows what we stand to gain from confronting the shame we share with its liberating antidote: the truth.
Mona Chalabi
Mona Chalabi is an award-winning writer and illustrator who uses data as the foundation for her work.
By translating complex statistics, Mona has earned a Pulitzer Prize, fellowships at the British Science Association and Royal Society for the Arts as well as an Emmy nomination. In 2025, she was named a Royal Designer for Industry.
In recent years, her art has been exhibited at the Smithsonian Design Museum, the Tate, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Design Museum. Her work can also be found at The New Yorker, The Guardian, Netflix, NPR, the BBC and National Geographic. She is also the executive producer and creative director of an animated TV show with Ramy Youssef and A24. She studied international relations in Paris and Arabic in Jordan.
Ten Lives is Mona's first book.
Event venue & nearby stays
Blackwell's Bookshop, 48-51 Broad Street, Oxford, United Kingdom
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