All the Early Bird tickets for The Story 2016 were sold ages ago, and Standard tickets are going fast. So if you haven’t got a ticket yet, get one (or more!) now.

If you want to know why you should be at The Story in Feb next year, here’s three good reasons – our first three speakers announced for next year’s event:

Gaia Vince is a writer and broadcaster specialising in science and the environment. She has been the front editor of the journal Nature Climate Change, the news editor of Nature and online editor of New Scientist. Her work has appeared in newspapers and magazines in the UK, US and Australia, including The Guardian, Science, Scientific American and Australian Geographic. She has a column, Smart Planet, on BBC Online and devises and presents science programmes for BBC radio. Her first book, Adventures In The Anthropocene: A journey to the heart of the planet we made, won the Royal Society Winton Prize for science books this year. She blogs at WanderingGaia.com and tweets at @WanderingGaia

C. Spike Trotman was born in DC, grew up in MD, and lives in IL. She runs Iron Circus Comics, Chicago’s largest comics publisher, and is responsible for Poorcraft, The Sleep of Reason, New World, and the Smut Peddler series, along with the webcomic “Templar, Arizona.” A Kickstarter early adopter, her projects have raised nearly half a million dollars in funding and earned multiple awards. Her achievements are just of few of many like it in the independent publishing world, a world reinvigorated by online comics, diversifying audiences, increased access and crowdfunding. In case you couldn’t tell, she’s  a big fan of where things are going.

Daniel Meadows is a photographer and storyteller who has spent a lifetime recording British society, challenging the status quo by working in a collaborative way to capture extraordinary aspects of ordinary life through pictures, audio recordings and short movies. He is best known for his 1973-74 journey around England in the Free Photographic Omnibus when he travelled 10,000 miles in a converted double-decker and shot 958 portraits in “free studio” sessions on the streets of 22 different British towns and cities. This is a project he revisited in the 1990s, photographing again some of the subjects of those portraits for his widely published series National Portraits: Now & Then. His pioneering community storytelling project BBC Capture Wales (2001-08) encouraged many hundreds of people across Wales to embrace the arrival of the digital age in pop-up workshops by making their own two minutes of TV, framing their memories and pictures into digital stories, “multimedia sonnets from the people”. Capture Wales won a BAFTA Cymru in 2002. His work has been exhibited widely both in the UK and on the continent of Europe. Solo shows include ICA London (1975), The Photographers’ Gallery London (1987), National Media Museum Bradford (2011). Group shows include Serpentine Gallery London (1973) and Tate Britain (2007).

So that’s the first three of the dozen or so speakers you’ll be hearing from at The Story 2016. There are many more to come, so get your tickets now!