In the 2024 Birthday Honours, Suzanne Heywood was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) for services to business leadership.
[2] Having sold the family house and a family-owned hotel, and initially sponsored by a hotel group,[3] from 1976 to 1986 the Cooks sailed around the world in a schooner called Wavewalker, retracing initially the third and final voyage of the eighteenth-century explorer and cartographer Captain Cook (to whom they were not related despite the shared surname).
She notes her father's motivation for undertaking the sailing voyage as a desire to be "heroic", observing also his "quite aggressive" nature, and recounts her mother's cold behaviour: "she wouldn’t speak to me, or would refer to me as “her” in front of me.
Prior to her death, Heywood's mother typed a letter, found later by her daughter, in which she "threatened that if I went ahead with the book, she would write nasty things about me and Jeremy, and try to ruin his career.
[2][11] She completed her Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) degree in 1993: her thesis was titled "Filial imprinting in chicks: processes and stimulus representations".
[2][5] She left McKinsey & Company in 2016 to join the Exor Group as managing director;[11] in November 2022 she was appointed Chief Operating Officer.
[23] In 2021, Heywood spoke out in defence of her late husband, following criticisms made in Nigel Boardman's review of the Lex Greensill affair.
[24][25] In 2023, Heywood published Wavewalker: Breaking Free, a memoir of her childhood at sea and her efforts to educate herself in order to escape back to a more normal life.