Cathryn Kemp

Cathryn Kemp is a British author, journalist and Sunday Times bestselling ghostwriter whose work includes memoir, commercial non-fiction and historical fiction. Her own memoir, Coming Clean, recounts her recovery from prescription painkiller addiction and won the Big Red Read Prize for Non-Fiction. She has also written and ghostwritten numerous life stories, drawing on her journalistic experience to explore survival, social inequality and people living under extreme pressure.

Her historical-fiction debut, A Poisoner’s Tale, reimagines the life of Giulia Tofana, a seventeenth-century Roman apothecary reputed to have supplied poison to women trapped in abusive marriages. Published in 2024, it won the Historical Writers’ Association Debut Crown in 2025. Kemp’s second historical novel, They Can’t Burn Us All, is set during the Icelandic witch trials of the seventeenth century and follows a woman resisting the religious and patriarchal forces responsible for persecuting her family.