Our host Vick Hope is joined by Kelly Cates.
Kelly is an award-winning football presenter and broadcaster. She has been a familiar and much-loved face in the world of sports broadcasting for over 27 years, covering everything from the Premier League to the World Cup and the Olympics. Known for her warmth, wit and sharp insight, she has become one of the most respected voices in football.
A lifelong Liverpool fan, Kelly grew up in Southport as the daughter of football legend Kenny Dalglish, before going on to study Maths at the University of Glasgow.
Since 2025, she has co-hosted Match of the Day alongside Gabby Logan and Mark Chapman, and she continues to balance an incredibly busy career with life in London, where she lives with her two daughters.
Listen to the full episode here and read on to discover Kelly’s five most influential books by women.
‘It was my mum’s Auntie Mamie who bought me this book and she’d lived in Canada and so she had that Prince Edward Island connection and the scenery reminded her of her time there, and she gave me this book and I just loved Anne. She was just the right side of naughty. She was always getting into scrapes and dying her hair green because she bought something from a door to door salesman […] I just loved it, I loved that world, I loved her personality.’
‘All of Heyer’s Regency romances are very witty in that low-key way, and it’s got that really lovely dialogue in it between the couples where there’s a sharpness to it and an intelligence that’s lovely to hear.’
‘Heartburn is just so sharp and so funny and she uses that to write about her pain in such a relatable way. I think that there is a level on which she’s talking, which if you took it on surface level you’d think “oh she’s fine, she’s coping with it, she’s moved on”, but she writes about the pain underneath so brilliantly.’
‘At a time when we’re so clear in our ideas of what’s right and wrong and polarised by our opinions, it reminds us that the truth is often much more complicated and that to dig your heels in and to be completely inflexible can damage you as much as it damages other people. I think she writes about it brilliantly and she dismantles the foundations of the moral high ground so brilliantly.’
‘This is the one I recommend to friends who have stopped reading, or if your head is just all over the place, and you just want something that grabs you from the beginning because Marian Keyes has this gift of writing the way that women speak to each other in conversation, in the way that she tackles dark, difficult subjects but always it that tone of sitting over a coffee.’
