Hag: Forgotten Folktales Retold

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Both she and Johnson explore the problems of writing new versions of unstable stories that developed from a flexible and amorphous oral culture that has reshaped itself over time. As I grew up, this love for the wyrd and eerie remained, but I began to appreciate how this edge could be reinvented time upon time. Each Hag story has a woman either at its heart or close to it; women's friendships and their enmities, their power to give birth and to deal death, to harm and to heal thread their way through the narratives.

What she comes up with in The Holloway is, instead, a clever contemporary take on a Somerset folktale about a drunken, abusive farmer who gets what he deserves at the hand of the pixies.

Her work spans journalism, audio, TV and curatorial projects for which she's received various accolades, including LGBTQI+ Broadcaster of The Year and Rising Star at Wow. She has been longlisted for the Sunday Times Short Story Award and the New Angle Award for East Anglian writing.

The dark, gothic influenced, traditional folk tales are sourced from all corners of the British Isles, originating from the oral tradition, and fittingly this collection began as podcasts that evolved into these fascinating curated stories by Carolyne Larrington, professor of Medieval English Literature. There’s something about telling the story in the immediate form – by speaking, especially with folklore tales travelling through the word of mouth for years before things have started to be written down.She is the founder of gal-dem, a media company committed to spotlighting the creative talents of people of colour from marginalised genders. A collection of short stories that are retellings of British folklore and mythology selected and introduced by Professor Carolyne Larrington. 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 . She recognises the link between herself and the tales her ancestors told, and is quite literally buried underneath the earth of her home county.