01 about
Catherine Riley is the author of Is This Love?, published by Serpents Tail in August 2022. Is This Love? has been long-listed for the 2023 Polari First Book prize.
Catherine is director of the Primadonna festival, a weekend of writing, creativity and ideas celebrating diversity, inclusivity and equality.
She is also an expert on contemporary feminist publishing in the UK. She has published two books on women's writing and publishing, and has contributed chapters and articles to edited collections on these themes. Catherine has also 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.
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.
02 books
Is This Love? (Serpents Tail) was published in August 2022.
'Women Publishers in the 21st Century – Assessing Their Impact on New Writing... and Writers' in Studying English Literature in Context: Critical Readings (Cambridge University Press) was published in 2022.
Feminism and Women’s Writing: An Introduction with Lynne Pearce (Edinburgh University Press) was published in March 2018.
The Virago Story: Assessing the Impact of a Feminist Publishing Phenomenon (Berghahn Books) followed in May 2018.
See also Women's Periodicals and Print Culture in Britain, 1940s-2000s: The Contemporary Period (Edinburgh University Press) published in 2020.
Catherine is now working on the first draft of her second novel.
03 articles
04 events
Exhibition
Curator/producer, Spirited – exhibition celebrating the suffrage centenary, focused on young, working class women
TV
Talking head on BBC4 documentary Virago: Changing the World One Page at a Time
Campaign
Conceived and co-wrote Women's Equality Party's ‘Not Everyone Gets It’ campaign for the 2017 general election
Speaking
Invited speaker, Creative Women, Creative Business festival, the British Library
Film
Co-wrote and produced Party Election Broadcast, shown on BBC1 and ITV in May 2016 as part of London Mayoral elections
Conference
Guest speaker, ‘Time and Tide' festival of women writers
and journalists