
Cathryn Haynes is a poignant story writer and the author of the romantic tale A Tiding of Magpies, available on our website.
Cathryn read English Language and Literature at St Hilda’s College, Oxford, but only started seriously thinking about writing very recently. She is a member of novelist Sara Banerji’s creative writing class and poet Penny Boxall’s poetry-writing group. Cathryn’s writing has won her third prize in Chipping Norton Literary Festival Short Story Competition. She enjoys fairy-tales, myths, legends, and the work of women writers like Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield, and Angela Carter. She is currently working on writing enough good stories to put together in a collection.
Cathryn was born in Camberley. She currently lives in Oxford with two cats, a minuscule garden, a lifetime’s accumulation of books and music, and a laptop that keeps on crashing.
A short Q&A with Cathryn Haynes can be seen below:
Q: Do you have a good luck writing talisman?
A: A sealing-wax seal I found in an antique stall in Monmouth market when I was 18. It bore the initial ‘C’, and the synchronicity seemed delightfully appropriate. I still use it to seal special letters.
Q: Do you have a favourite quotation?
A: ‘Comedy is tragedy that happens to other people.’ Angela Carter.
Q: If you could teleport anywhere real or fictional, where would it be and why?
A: Mervyn Peake’s Castle of Gormenghast. Written with an artist’s visual sense, and such vividly poetic language. The characters are so marvellous; I want to seize Fuschia and cry ‘Don’t trust him!’