Anna and Sam speak to Cathy Hayward about her writing process, getting up early and running an independent
bookshop. Plus enjoy a reading from her novel The Girl in the Maze.

Cathy trained as a journalist and edited a variety of trade publications, several of which were so niche they were featured on Have I Got News for You. She then moved into the world of PR and set up an award-winning communications agency before ten years later, giving up the world of PR to become a bookseller. She took over Kemptown Bookshop in May 2022 with the aim of developing the shop into a community hub with events to engage new and established readers, celebrate local authors and support underrepresented writers. Devastated and inspired in equal measure by the death of her parents in quick succession, Cathy completed The Creative Writing Programme out of which emerged her debut novel The Girl in the Maze about the experience of mothering and being mothered. It won Agora Books' Lost the Plot Work in Progress Prize 2020 and was longlisted for the Grindstone Literary Prize 2020 and Flash500 2020. It was published by Agora Books in November 2021. She has since written two further novels and is working on a fourth. Cathy lives in Brighton – sandwiched between the Downs and the sea –  with her husband, three children, two rescue cats and one very lively Hungarian Vizsla puppy. 

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