From the Archives: Kirsty Logan & Anya Bergman (2023)

The ILFD podcast is back! With Halloween just around the corner, let's listen back to authors Kirsty Logan & Anya Bergman talking all things witches with moderator Sarah Maria Griffin. Part of the 2023 edition of ILFD.

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How far would you go for justice? In two powerful additions to the witchlit canon, Kirsty Logan and Anya Bergman dig into the painful realities of life in the shadow of the witch trials.

The past few years has seen a blossoming of witch stories, and it’s not difficult to see why this period in European history has proven such a rich vein. These stories pitch characters on the fringes of society – through poverty, queerness or plain weirdness – against social forces beyond their control, and the extraordinary measures they must take for their freedom.

Kirsty Logan has become a leading light in Scotland’s weird gothic resurgence, and her third novel, Now She is Witch, follows unlikely allies Lux and Else on the path of vengeance for the execution of Lux’s mother. In Bergman’s debut novel, The Witches of Vardø, the teenage Ingeborg still has hopes of rescuing her mother from an island fortress, but like Lux and Else, she must also learn painful lessons about the needs of the many, and her personal quest for justice.

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Kirsty Logan is a fiction writer, book reviewer, freelance editor and writing mentor based in Glasgow. She is currently working on a short musical, a short story collection, and a very long novel.

Anya Bergman is resident in Ireland, is currently undertaking a PhD by Published Works at Edinburgh Napier University, and working on her next novel.

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‘Anya Bergman summons a historic witch trial with breathtaking detail and immediacy’ ― Hannah Kent (Burial Rites; Devotion)

'Kirsty Logan is one of the darkest and most playful of writers working right now' ― Stylist, *Books to Look Out For 2023*

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Presented with support from Scottish Books International

International Literature Festival Dublin is a Dublin City Council Initiative kindly supported by the Arts Council. Find out more at ilfdublin.com