Hag: Forgotten Folktales Retold

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From the islands of Scotland to the coast of Cornwall, the mountains of Galway to the depths of the Fens, these forgotten fables dance across our isles and conjure modern myths for the 21st Century. Vice Chair of the Royal Society of Literature, she was awarded an MBE For Services to Literature in 2021.

The Tale of Kathleen' by Eimar McBride was my first taste of McBride and I'm now very aware I have been missing out. Acc to Carolyne Larrington in the introduction, The British and Irish folktale traditions slipped away between the 18th and 19th centuries while other fairytales like the Grimms and Andersens’ with strict morals became popular. Here are sisters fighting for the love of the same woman, a pregnant archaeologist unearthing impossible bones, and lost children following you home.

It understands that the most mundane things in life are a rich source of comedy and that they often go hand in hand with every day tragedy . I found the framing of this collection to be very enjoyable (retelling traditional folktales) and I liked that "traditional" did not entail "white, male, and hetero. Even someone not interested in Folklore would enjoy this but I imagine it would boil the piss of a purist. Their potency and darkness transmuted, a warning, a lesson, brimming under the surface of our lives.

She co-presented the BBC's Turn Up for The Books podcast, alongside Simon Savidge and Bastille frontman Dan Smith.

The main reason is that - this re-telling isn't a re-telling at all, it is a word-to-word story copied from the original tale, even the title is the same. After that the baby, Muir starts to spend six months with his mother and six months with his father until one day, he decides that he wants to spend all his time with his mother. Logan treads familiar ground here -selkies and women giving birth to their children was an important element to her debut novel The Gracekeepers- but I love her writing so you don't hear me complain.

But she transposes onto it the story of a woman who has been transformed into the panther, and in doing so mashes up traditional Indian storytelling with the Staffordshire legend. She is the founder of gal-dem, a media company committed to spotlighting the creative talents of people of colour from marginalised genders. We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others.

Some end almost rapidly, with a reader wishing there was more to it, making the story stay with a reader for far longer. This was weirdly metafictional, a story of how this particular story came about, but with supernatural features of said story taking place in the real world. Hag swarms with mermaids, boggarts and shape-shifters but it also explores the hopes and visceral dreads from which those creatures emerged in the human imagination . This project has a meta-fictional element to it, and two of the stories take this to a heightened level.

This is not one for those of you who don't like stories about demons, and it's very heavy on childbirth and miscarriage.I felt that the strident anti-Catholic rhetoric actually lessened the impact of the original by highlighting and underlining what is more subtly conveyed in the folktale. She herself a stranger in the land before she had dreamt of the wide flat skies and horizons, the sprawling dappled green landscape, windmills dotted along the Broads' periphery spinning like moored gods. Irenosen Okojie’s Rosheen is based on the Norfolk tale of The Dauntless Girl, but the eponymous protagonist is Okojie’s creation.