Dr Catherine Blackledge is the internationally-acclaimed author of The Story of V, a cultural history of the vagina (Weidenfeld & Nicolson) which was first published in 2003 and has sold over 100,000 copies in thirteen countries and ten languages. An updated edition Raising the Skirt: the Unsung Power of the Vagina launched in 2020 in the UK, in Poland as Wagina (2019) and in Spain as El Origen del Mundo (2020).

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Women describe Raising the Skirt as their bible and say it has changed their lives. Catherine has been described as a visionary for her prescience in presenting her radical view of the vagina nearly 20 years ago when the subject was still taboo.

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In 2015, Catherine published The Man Who Saw the Future, a biography of the first celebrity astrologer William Lilly whose popular forecasts changed the course of the English Civil War. 

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By background, Catherine is a journalist and scientist. She lives in the north west of England with her husband and daughter.