After Dinner SpeakersCatherine Mayer is an author, journalist, and activist. She co-founded the Women’s Equality Party and was president for a decade.
Furthermore, Catherine also co-founded Primadonna Festival, an award-winning festival of ideas and literature that changes lives.
Her novel, TIME/LIFE, about love, time travel and the impacts of technology, will be published in April 2025.
Her next nonfiction book, Send Them Victorious: Royal Women, their battles, and why we should care, will be published in 2026.
Catherine’s other books include:
- Amortality: The Pleasures and Perils of Living Agelessly
- Attack of the Fifty Foot Women: How Gender Equality Can Save the World!
- Good Grief: Embracing Life at a Time of Death
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 Mayer 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 and later became London Bureau Chief, TIME Europe Editor, and Editor at Large.
“Catherine was fabulous – razor-sharp, humorous and extremely engaging”
The Charity Awards
She was the founding executive director of Datum Future, a data and technology think tank. She is also on the advisory board of Noon, a media platform for women in midlife and beyond.
The Globe Theatre commissioned Catherine to write and perform an original piece for its 2020 Voices in the Dark series, Notes to the Forgotten She-Wolves.
In 2018, she performed Hello Boys with Grayson Perry at the Bridge Theatre. In 2019, her one-woman show Catherine Mayer: FFS toured the UK and Ireland.
Catherine was the lead candidate for the Women’s Equality Party in London in the 2019 European elections. She also served as the elected President of the Foreign Press Association in London from 2003 to 2005.
She is on the founding committee of WOW—the Women of the World and Death Festival, launched in 2022, which she also co-curated.
Catherine was 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
- NatWest Spirit of Everywoman Award 2018 (with Sandi Toksvig)
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.
Catherine Mayer Speaking Topics:
Difference Works: Why true diversity and inclusion is about much more than ticking boxes
Organisations know they need to improve the diversity of their workforces—but they often don’t know why. Catherine unravels the confusion surrounding diversity and diversity programmes, highlights the dangers of creating echo chambers or cultures that suppress dissident opinions and demonstrates the value of more inclusive cultures.
Wonder Women: How unlocking female potential benefits us all
This addresses some of the key points in the ‘Difference Works’ keynote above but looks more at female participation in the economy and the workplace. Why do organisations struggle to retain women, and how can they improve that record? And why the rewards of doing so are huge.
The Future of Media in the Digital Age
During a 30-year career, Catherine saw first-hand how digital technologies initially enabled news organisations to flourish and destroyed the economic models supporting them. Catherine discusses and assesses the industry’s repercussions for democracy and our understanding of the world and forecasts developments in new media.
How to Have Conversations in a Polarised World
We are more divided than ever before, not just on subjects that directly touch our lives. How can we hope to reach a consensus in the workplace if we’re passionately polarised on Meghan and Harry or whether cancel culture even exists? Catherine looks at the drivers of such polarisation, unpicks how these arguments are often proxies for other issues such as race and inequality, and looks at what works and what doesn’t to defuse potential hostilities and bring people together.
Good Grief: navigating personal and public loss in the workplace
There is something much more damaging than saying the wrong thing to the newly bereaved—saying nothing at all. Not that there’s much value to mumbled platitudes or ill-timed expressions of sympathy (grieving people often seek a semblance of normality at work and may not wish to be forced to answer questions about how they’re feeling). Luckily, such mistakes are easy to avoid. Catherine talks about what she’s learned from dealing with the bereaved and from her own widowhood and other losses.
Inside the Royal Family
Catherine spent two years researching her biography of King Charles III and many more years behind the scenes covering the Royals and is now working on a book about the representation—and misrepresentation—of royal women from Anne Boleyn to Meghan. She gives insights and tells anecdotes from the strange world she dubs “Planet Windsor” and highlights the Royals’ surprisingly pervasive influence on public life.
