‘She’s a great inspiration,” says Nelly Ben Hayoun-Stépanian, picking up a photo she keeps in her wildly decorated office of the scientist Marie Curie, the first woman to win a Nobel prize and also the first person to win one twice. “I pick people that really inspire me. Partners in crime. When a project is difficult, I think, ‘What would Marie Curie have done? What would Hannah Arendt have done?’ Hahaha.”
She talks mile-a-minute, finishing sentences with a laugh as she speaks to me in her office, which could well be the best one in London: an old, graffiti-covered tube carriage plonked on top of the roof of a Shoreditch nightclub, with views over the city. Its interior is loud and colourful: posters and flyers plaster the walls, while the floor is a trippy swirl of purples and pinks. And, propped up on her desk, is that photo of Curie.
