Catherine Mayer
Catherine Mayer is a bestselling author and journalist, with a career spanning The Economist, the German news weekly FOCUS and TIME magazine, where she served as Europe Editor and Editor at Large. Her books include Amortality: The Pleasures and Perils of Living Agelessly; Attack of the 50 Ft Women: How Gender Equality Can Save the World, and Good Grief: Embracing Life at a Time of Death. Her biography of King Charles III, revised and updated in 2022, is published by WH Allen/Penguin. She is the co-founder and President of the UK Women’s Equality Party. She is also the co-founder of Primadonna Festival.
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Catherine Mayer's 2025 biography
About Catherine Mayer
Catherine Mayer is an author, journalist and activist. She is the co-founder and President of the Women’s Equality Party and the co-founder of Primadonna Festival.
Her 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.
Catherine has worked at The Economist, held deputy editorships at Business Traveller and International Management magazines 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.
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 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, and of the Death Festival, launched in 2022, which she also co-curated. She 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 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.
Catherine Mayer's 2025 talks & topics
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 then destroyed the economic models supporting them. Catherine discusses and assesses the repercussions not just within the industry but for democracy and our understanding of the world, as well as forecasting developments in new media.
How to Have Conversations in a Polarised World
We are more divided than ever before and not just on subjects that directly touch on our lives. How can we hope to reach 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 the way that these arguments are often proxies for other issues such as race and inequality, and looks at what works, and what definitely doesn’t, to defuse potential hostilities and bring people together.
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, but looking in more detail at the subject of female participation in the economy and the workplace. Why is it that organisations struggle to retain women and how can they improve that record? And, why the rewards of doing so are huge.
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. She gives insights and tells anecdotes from the strange world she dubs “Planet Windsor” and also highlights the surprisingly pervasive influence of the Royals on public life.