This site is a small sampling of Vicky Hayward’s work as a freelance writer, food historian, book editor and arts consultant. The projects are grouped around topics and live issues to give an overview of subject areas.
Vicky grew up in England, where she learned to cook professionally before studying history at the University of Cambridge, specialising in social and cultural history viewed through different methodologies. Her interest in history shaped her early work as a senior book editor at Weidenfeld & Nicolson and at Booth-Clibborn Editions, the London-based publisher of cutting-edge visual books. She also lived and worked in Vanuatu, working on a research project and later as an interpreter, translator and editor. As a features writer in London from 1986 she covered popular culture, social issues, food, the arts and women’s issues for the British press. She first got to know Spain as a child on family holidays and her writing brought her to Madrid in 1990. Features for international media since then have covered social issues and visual arts. Her work on food and gastronomy has included regular essays for Spain Gourmetour (1992-2005) and her features on flamenco led on to her collaborations with live flamenco programming, film and audio. She has written three pocket guide-books, many essays for regional and city guides, and she contributed to the relaunched Michelin Spain Green Guide (2011). In recent years her writings on food, culture and history have converged. She revised 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 contextualised her English translation of the book against a longer narrated social history, accompanied by modern versions of the dishes. In 2017 she was honoured to receive the Jane Grigson Trust Award and the Aragonese Academy of Gastronomy’s Award for Best Gastronomic Research. In 2018, following publication of the Spanish edition, she received the Premio Nacional de Gastronomía for Best Publication from the Royal Academy of Gastronomy, and in 2019 the newly created Juan Altamiras award. In 2020 a new essay on Altamiras was highly commended in the Sophie Coe Prize for Food History.
She is represented by Andrew Nurnberg Associates, London.
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A todo el mundo no le gusten los homenajes, pero sus mensajes pueden encender chispas inesperadas. Sucedió hace un mes….
To read more: www.nuevoartedelacocina.com
Winner of the Jane Grigson Trust Award, 2017
To read more: www.nuevoartedelacocina.com
Winner of the Jane Grigson Trust Award, 2017
To read more: www.prospectbooks.co.uk
To read more: www.sophiecoeprize.wordpress.com
Here is the video, courtesy of and with thanks to Madrid Fusion: Youtube link
To read more: www.newartofcookery.com – blog, Amsterdam symposium
I don’t move forward in flamenco, I go backwards,” says Antonio Gades decisively. “Where there is a flamenco singer and a guitar, you kill their power by adding an orchestral arrangement. On the other hand I like flamenco dance set in a different context ….
Gades has always cut an unusual figure in flamenco. Born into a communist family – “but not a Gypsy one” – he moved from Elda, a shoemaking town in Alicante, to Madrid as a young child following his father’s imprisonment there for his politics. At the age of eleven, he went to work to support the family and, five years later, turned to dance in the hope that it might bring in a decent income ….
Gades’s company, which he set up in 1963, has flourished, growing from three to thirty-one dancers, and received many accolades, but it has remained unsubsidised and unsponsored. “Freedom is expensive, it’s not given to you,” he comments curtly. He has now been creating choreography freely for over three decades and many would say his most recent work, Fuenteovejuna, is his masterpiece ….“Yes, it’s true there’s a real afición for genuine flamenco today and it’s seen differently – now it’s in opera houses and universities. But beyond that I don’t see anything that has changed significantly.
Perhaps what is most surprising for onlookers is that the Andalusians take their Japanese counterparts very seriously. In the late 1980s the Seville Bienale hosted a three-day festival of their flamenco, and today the work of artists like Shoji Kojima and Yoko Komatsubara remain influential.
Those who have lived within both Spanish and Japanese cultures are not as surprised by the phenomenon. “I think there are good cultural reasons for the fascination,” says María Dolores Rodriguez, a teacher at Madrid’s official language school. She lived in Japan for ten years. “Flamenco expresses intense emotions in a highly disciplined form. It shares the Japanese ideas of freeing ki, or energy, and of kata, the body-sculptured fixed positions struck in kabuki and noh theatre, in mijomboyu dancing and martial arts. At the same time, in flamenco performers have more freedom.”
Atsuko, aged 22, who came to study dance in Jerez, agrees. “In flamenco the technique is nothing unless you have feeling. You have to be yourself. That’s what I like. When I’m angry I dance best. It’s the exact opposite of what we’re used to in Tokyo.
The workshop’s and contest’s success are rooted in the hidden cultural wealth of Spain’s prison communities and the commitment of those who created the project. Prison director Francisco Velasco raises its scanty local funding. Guitarist and maestro Rafael Treñas teaches for just 40,000 pesetas (£200.00) a month, less than his fees for a single performance. Prison educator Antonio Estévez has often dipped into his own pocket to cover costs when the budget hasn’t covered them. No coincidence, perhaps, that all three grew up in or near Gitano barrios of the Andalusian cities where flamenco, as intertwined song, guitar and dance, have evolved over at least three centuries and are a daily element of life, often binding communities.
For Estévez, who had the original idea for the workshop, its success is rooted in the strength of the prison’s Gitano culture. “It works because it’s based on the prisoners’ real world. You won’t persuade most Gitanos to do a class on computing or gardening, but flamenco can inspire them to dedícate long hours to studying. By 1995, when I first visited the workshop, it had reached such a high standard that some students were being coached for public performance.
When my grandfather sung at night, my grandmother would open her arms and dance,” recalls María Soleá, aged 63, from Cádiz. “How she danced with her arms! And if somebody we didn’t know appeared at the door, my grandfather would say, “Close the door, girl, for I don’t want strangers watching my wife and children sing and dance.”
While María’s family all sang and dance at fiestas, she was the first of their women to perform for money. “I didn’t have special dresses or anything like that, and I danced in my everyday rope-soled shoes.”
V: Eva, you’re often quoted as saying that just one flamenco performance you saw with your father made you decide to dance. I think Manuela Carrasco and Concha Vargas were performing?
Eva: Yes, but it wasn’t the baile (dance) that impressed me as much as the cante (singing). I’ve always felt song is the mother of all flamenco. Take Paco de Lucía’s work. You listen to his music and say, “Madre mía”, how blessed he is by the gift of knowing how to listen. I don’t think I’d be a dancer if I could sing.
Paco: It may not be immediately clear, but we build our performances around the palos – the soleá, seguiriya and so on. Infact, we try to pick forgotten song forms for dance … the trilla, the mirabrás and so on. Every songform is its own world. There are rhythm, harmonies, melodies, but also colours and landscape, light, perhaps those of Cádiz or Triana. A songform’s lyrics also emerge from a particular situation, but it’s up to us as performers to reveal that if we want to.
Eva: But I also feel, as a dancer, the form of a seguiriya or indeed any palo, must also come from a personal search. Not everyone wants to do that, but you need to share a personal search and what you have lived within your dance.
V: What was recording like when you were younger?
Sordera: We’d have two days to make an LP. That is, two days with a guitarist and a couple of palmeros. That was it. I would write the cantes for the album on a piece of paper and order them as we went along. Vicente would come along and do palmas. He was just a boy. We’d go to the studio in the afternoon, open our throats, perhaps with the help of a whisky, and start. We didn’t rehearse. The labels worked that way to save money. The artists took it for granted and worked around it.
V: Flamenco’s so difficult to capture well on record, isn’t it?
Vicente: It’s very hard to keep the warmth alive in a recording studio. A lot of people say it’s a thing of the past. There’s a record called “Así Canta Jerez”, recorded thirty years ago, which is wonderful. My father, Terremoto, Sernita and four other cantaores sing on it.
Sordera: Nobody believes it when I tell them it was recorded in four hours!
Sordera Chico: But of course that’s when it works … when people are enjoying themselves.
Here’s a clip from the video: Youtube link
To view the clip: PULSE: A Stomp Odyssey
Artists included Jose Maya, Alfonso Losa, Rocío Bazán with Francisco Javier Jimeno, Paco Cruz, and José Anillo.
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(with, among others, Andoni Luis Aduriz, Sergi Arola, Elena Arzak, Quique Dacosta, Aitor Elizegi, Ramón Freixa, José Carlos García, Isaac Salaberria, Jordi Parramón, Pepe Rodríguez Rey, Marcelo Tejedor)
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As series and commissioning editor.
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The highest-selling hardback in the UK, 1984
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By Stephen Bailey. Booth-Clibborn Editions, London. Designed by Graphic Thought Facility (2000)
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