Writer | Catherine Riley

01 about

Catherine Riley is a feminist historian and writer, and an expert on contemporary feminist publishing in the UK. She has taught English Literature and Gender Studies at Lancaster and Northumbria Universities and Birkbeck College in London, where she completed her doctoral thesis on the feminist publisher Virago.

Catherine has published two books on women's writing and publishing, and has contributed chapters and articles to edited collections on these themes.

She worked for two years as Head of Communications at the Women’s Equality Party, the UK’s first feminist political party, helping build it from the ground up before leaving at the conclusion of the 2017 general election.

Catherine now works as general manager for Primadonna, a festival of writing, creativity and ideas celebrating diversity, inclusivity and equality. She continues to write about trends in gender theory, publishing and social change. She is also writing a novel.

02 books

Feminism and Women’s Writing: An Introduction with Lynne Pearce (Edinburgh University Press) was published in March 2018.

It was followed in May 2018 by The Virago Story: Assessing the Impact of a Feminist Publishing Phenomenon (Berghahn Books).

She contributed to Women's Periodicals and Print Culture in Britain, 1940s-2000s: The Contemporary Period (Edinburgh University Press) in 2020.

Forthcoming in 2022 is her chapter on women publishers in the 21st century in Studying English Literature in Context: Critical Readings (Cambridge University Press).