Catherine Mayer
Author, journalist, activist, speaker
Catherine Mayer, an author, journalist and activist, co-founded the Women’s Equality Party, serving for a decade as its president, and also Primadonna Festival, an award-winning festival of ideas and literature. Her most recent book, TIME/LIFE, a novel about love, time travel and the impacts of technology, was published in 2025. She co-wrote the track Rocket Men with the band Rear Window for their album Happiness by Design and the TIME/LIFE audiobook. Her next nonfiction title, DIVIDE AND RULE: Royal Women and Their Battles, will be published on 21 May 2026.
Her other books include Amortality: The Pleasures and Perils of Living Agelessly; Attack of the Fifty Foot Women: How Gender Equality Can Save the World! and the memoir, Good Grief: Embracing Life at a Time of Death, which contains letters written by her mother after both women were widowed at the start of the pandemic. In 2022, WH Allen/Penguin published a new, substantially updated edition of her bestselling biography of King Charles III, Charles: The Heart of a King. She is a regular special contributor to ITV for historic royal occasions.
Catherine has worked at The Economist, and spent 11 years as a foreign correspondent for the German news weekly, FOCUS. In 2004, she joined TIME as a senior editor, later became London Bureau Chief, TIME Europe Editor and, finally, Editor at Large.
She was the founding executive director of the data and technology think tank, Datum Future. She is on the advisory board of Noon, the media platform for women in midlife and beyond, and is currently working with the Society of Hopeful Technologists.
Catherine was commissioned by the Globe Theatre to write and perform an original piece for its 2020 Voices in the Dark series, Notes to the Forgotten She-Wolves. She was shortlisted for the 2025 Interwoven poetry prize.
She performed Hello Boys with Grayson Perry at the Bridge Theatre in 2018. Her one-woman show Catherine Mayer: FFS toured the UK and Ireland in 2019.
She was the lead candidate for the Women’s Equality Party in London in the 2019 European elections. She served as the elected President of the Foreign Press Association in London from 2003–2005. She is on the founding committee of WOW—the Women of the World festival. She co-curated the 2022 Death Festival and acted as a judge for the 2018 Women’s Prize for Fiction.
The winner of the FPA Story of the Year in 2010 and shortlisted for the Orwell Prize the following year, she has also been named in Total Politics’ Top Political Journalists, WIE Women in Excellence 2013, Progress 1000 Evening Standard Equality Champion 2016, Oxford University Suffrage Champion 2018, Gender Equality Top 100: Most Influential People in Global Policy 2018 and, with Sandi Toksvig, NatWest Spirit of Everywoman Award 2018.
After the death of her husband, the musician Andy Gill, she took on his unfinished projects, releasing two EPs by his band Gang of Four, and acting as executive producer for a tribute album, The Problem of Leisure: A celebration of Andy Gill and Gang of Four featuring globally famous musicians. She manages his music estate.