The winners of the British Fantasy Awards 2026 were announced at Fantasycon. Find out all the details on our blog.
For all things fantasy, horror, and speculative fiction
-
Announcement:
A Hagstravaganza
Tracy Fahey writes us this missive just days before she travels to the UK to talk to four different audiences about the Irish Hag, the Cailleach, in the wake of the publication of her 2026 book, Queens of the Crone Age (PS Publishing).
It’s been a long and strange journey since I first started scribbling stories exactly five years ago on residency in Cill Rialaig. There, in my little stone cottage by the edge of the ocean, I listened to the wind whip through the bracken and rain pelt the glass panes of my studio as I scribbled stories inspired by the mythological Cailleach, who I’d newly discovered through local folk tales. A woman in mid-life, her stories represented her as strong, powerful, autonomous, sensuous and mischievous. I found it a welcome antidote to the ways older women are represented in our culture—as villain-coded murderous scapegoats, as silenced and invisible crones, or as menopausal women in need of medical attention.
I had no idea then that my scribbles would coalesce into something more permanent, but the stories grew and grew from that initial start into a set of notebooks that I kept referring to as my ‘Hag Project.’ Something—something—kept pulling me back to it. And the stories started to find a home, in anthologies by Nephente Press, Egaeus Press, Nosetouch Press. Editors and readers started responding. ‘What Happens At The End’ won the Paul Cave Prize For Literature, while ‘The Night Hag’ and ‘Witchwalking’ appeared on Ellen Datlow’s Recommended Reading List for 2024 from The Best Horror of the Year series. The concept of the project won me a Saari fellowship and a two month bursary for a supported stay in Finland to write.
All of this gave me the courage to pitch my large manuscript of stories, now interspersed with the Hag’s own story, to PS Publishing. In another residency in Cove Park, I looked out at the mountains sacred to the Cailleach and pressed ‘SEND.’ Whether it was Hag magic or luck, Nicky Crowther read it and liked it. I worked with her and Mike Smith and my wonderful cover artist Jacob Stack to get it ready for its launch at the Cymera Festival in Edinburgh earlier this year.
The movement grows (chicken) legs
And that, I thought, was that—that was where the story of the book would start to fizzle out; there’d be a spot of interviews, a few events, and then I’d get back to my next project. But then something unexpected happened. It turned out I wasn’t the only one craving to hear stories of modern folk battling their way through the polycrisis of late-stage capitalism in search of a softer, greener, older way of living associated with strong matriarchal figures from mythology.
More and more opportunities started to present themselves and a Hag Tour began to unroll: A second launch with Banner Books in Ireland; a workshop at the new Aonach na Sionna festival in Shannon; an in-person conversation with Dr Maria Beville as part of the TUS research series; a newspaper interview; a conference paper on the Hag in University College Cork; a day of speculative fiction discussion in the Seamus Heaney Centres, Queens University Belfast; and another upcoming paper on researching and writing Queens of the Crone Age at the Dark Enchantments conference at the University of Sheffield. At all these events I talked to many people, especially women, who were researching the Hag, or working with her as a creative inspiration, or simply interested in finding out more about her.
And then I met with Seed Talks, who I’ve now been working with since July on a series of talks throughout Ireland and the UK on ‘Folklore, Female Ageing, and the Hag.’ If you’re not familiar with Seed Talks, they’re a company founded in London in 2021 by William McLean, and they work with academics, neuroscientists, clinical psychologists, and cultural historians to deliver talks that are aimed at the sweet spot between academia and popular culture, using venues more associated with gigs than traditional lectures. Based on the deep research I conducted across Ireland, Scotland and Finland in the four years of writing Queens of the Crone Age , I’ve put together a touring talk that spans the vast mythology of the Hag and makes a case for her importance in contemporary society. We sold out our first two venues in Dublin and Cork, and tickets currently on sale for five more in the coming weeks (see details below).
What I’ve discovered is that there’s an appetite out there to see versions of the Hag that don’t correspond to what critic Natalie Keoghan has termed ‘the hackneyed Hag’—a villainous, Final Boss-like figure so familiar to us through Hagsploitation movies like X, Barbarian, Hokum, or Weapons.
It feels particularly appropriate that this leg of the Hag Tour should launch at Samhain. On 31 October, the Season Of The Hag properly commences. In the old Celtic belief system, the Cailleach would rise at Samhain and rule over the land until the festival of Imbolc in February. She ushers in the death of the year; she is the keeper of landscape who navigates us through the wasteland of winter. And as I sit at my desk, the windowpanes rattled by the vestiges of Storm Boelo, I look forward to the coming Samhain Hagstravaganza—and another round of exciting, inspiring discussions with audiences around the UK, as we explore the history of the Hag and her relevance to us today.
Queens of the Crone Age is out now via PS Publishing as a signed limited edition hardback, or paperback. here.
Join the Hag Tour
Tickets are still available for London (21 Soho, hybrid event) on the 2/11, and Galway (Roisin Dubh) on 23/11—both an early show and late show—with low ticket warnings currently for Cambridge (Cambridge Junction) on the 1/11, Bristol (Hen & Chicken, hybrid event) on 3/11 and Limerick (Dolans Warehouse) on 18/11.
Meet the guest poster
Leave a Reply