Author

Vicky Hayward grew up in England, where she learned to cook professionally before studying history at the University of Cambridge. Her interest in social and cultural history shaped her work as a senior book editor at Weidenfeld & Nicolson and at Booth-Clibborn Editions, the London-based publisher of cutting-edge visual books. For two years she lived in Vanuatu, working as an interpreter, translator and editor. As a features writer in London she covered popular culture, social issues, food, the arts and women’s issues for the Britsh press. She first got to know Spain as a child on family holidays and in 1990 her writing brought her to Madrid. Features for international media since then have covered food and gastronomy, principally for Spain Gourmetour (1992-2005), and society and culture, in particular flamenco, which led on to her collaborations with live flamenco programming, film and audio. For Insight Guides she has written pocket books on the Costa Blanca (1991), Madrid (1994) and Valencia (2006), as well as essays for regional and city guides, and she contributed to the relaunched Michelin Spain Green Guide (2011). Her writing on food, culture and history have converged in recent years. She revised and wrote new brief essays on Spain for the Oxford Companion to Food’s second edition, and in 2016 she finished her modern retelling of New Art of Cookery, a seminal 1745 Spanish cookbook in which she wove her translation of the original dishes between modernized versions and a new contextual backdrop. In 2017 she received the Jane Grigson Trust Award and the Aragonese Academy of Gastronomy’s Award for Best Gastronomic Research, in 2018 she was awarded the Spanish Real Academia de Gastronomía’s prize as author of the best publication of 2017, and in 2019 she was honoured by the newly created Juan Altamiras prize. A new essay was highly commended by the Sophie Coe Prize 2020.

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