Author

Vicky Hayward has been living in Madrid for over twenty years. She grew up in England, where she trained and worked as a cook before studying history at the University of Cambridge. Her interest in social and cultural history shaped her work as a book editor at Weidenfeld & Nicolson and later at Booth-Clibborn Editions, the London-based publisher of cutting-edge visual books. For two years she lived in Vanuatu as it came to independence, working there as a translator, interpreter and editor. As a features writer in London she covered popular culture, social issues, food, the arts and women’s issues. She first got to know Spain as a child on family holidays and in 1990 her writing about Spanish food brought her to Madrid. Features for the international press since then have covered food and culture, in particular flamenco, which led on to collaborations in other media. Her travel writing began in the 1980s; it includes pocket guides to the Costa Blanca (1991), Madrid (1994), and Valencia (2006), and writing for Michelin Green Guides (2011). In recent years her writing on food, history and culture has focussed on Spanish cookery. She contributed brief essays to the second edition of the Oxford Companion to Food on areas of Spanish food culture and in 2016 she finished her modern retelling of a classic eighteenth-century Spanish recipe book in which she wove her translation of the original cookery text between her new contextual backdrop and modernised recipes. In 2017 she received the Jane Grigson Trust Award and the Aragonese Academy of Gastronomy’s Award for Best Gastronomic Research, in 2018 the Spanish Real Academia de Gastronomía’s prize for best publication of 2017, and in 2019 the newly created Juan Altamiras Prize.

Literary agent
Where «New Art» began: «Nadal: Galician Christmas»