The Modern Craft: Powerful Voices on Witchcraft Ethics

Join us in celebrating the publication day launch of The Modern Craft: Powerful Voices on Witchcraft Ethics with editors Claire Askew and Alice Tarbuck, as well as some of the anthology's other contributing writers, Stella Hervey Birrell, AW Earl, Briana Pegado, and Megan Rudden.

We are planning for this event to take place in the bookshop with an in-person audience, as well as a livestream for attendees watching from home. On the night of the event, our team will be wearing masks.

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About The Modern Craft: Powerful Voices on Witchcraft Ethics:

The Modern Craft is an eclectic and radical collection of essays on witchcraft practice and the ethics of magic, which gives that much-needed modern context to timeless wisdom. It offers a fascinating snapshot of contemporary occult practice viewed through an intersectional lens.

Essay topics include: the ethics of decolonization meditations on what it means to honour Mother Earth during the Anthropocene, the reclamation of agency for working-class and queer witches through practical spellwork, a gender-fluid perspective on breaking down traditional hierarchies in magical symbolism, a day in the life of a disabled Pagan Irish practitioner. Inspiring and electrifying glimpses from the brink of the contemporary Craft, these essays show how anyone, no matter who they are, can find positivity and the force for change in the subversive unknown.

Contributors include: Claire Askew, Lisa Marie Basile, Stella Hervey Birrell, Jane Claire Bradley, Madelyn Burnhope, Lilith Dorsey, AW Earl, Harry Josephine Giles, Simone Kotva, Iona Lee, Briana Pegado, Megan Rudden, Sabrina Scott, Em Still and Alice Tarbuck.

Claire Askew’s books include the creative writing guide Novelista (John Murray, 2020), the multi-award-winning novel All The Hidden Truths (Hodder, 2018), and the poetry collection How To Burn A Woman, recently featured on Radio 4’s Start The Week. She holds a PhD in Creative Writing from the University of Edinburgh, and has been a Scottish Book Trust Reading Champion, a Jessie Kesson Fellow, and the University of Edinburgh’s Writer in Residence. She lives in Cumbria.

Dr Alice Tarbuck is an award-winning writer and academic, based in Edinburgh. She has taught Creative Writing at the University of Dundee, and is a Scottish Book Trust New Writer’s Awardee for poetry. Her debut non-fiction book A Spell in the Wild: a year (and six centuries) of Magic is published by Hodder & Stoughton.

Stella Hervey Birrell is a poet and baby hedge-witch living in Midlothian, Scotland. Her work has been published in various places and her first poetry pamphlet with Algia Press sold out in its first month. She was Tyne & Esk’s writer of the year in 2021, and has been awarded the Glasgow Women’s Library Bold Types poetry prize.

AW Earl has been quietly practicing paganism and reading tarot for longer than they’ve been doing most other things they care about. A writer, storyteller and performer their work centres queerness, deviant bodies, folklore and the macabre. As Alys Earl, they published the gothic novel Time’s Fool, and short story collection Scars on Sound. They can usually be found lurking on Twitter (@alysdragon), where they are politely angry about transgender issues, or else wandering the Scots Borders and East Anglian coasts.

Briana Pegado is a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. She is a trained Theta Healer, a psychic intuitive and a student of astrology. She has written for years on topics ranging from the rise of feminist mysticism for Monstrous Regiment Publishing to rising inequality in the creative industries for Bella Caledonia. She was named one of Scotland's 30 Under 30 Inspiring Young Women in 2017 and has won a number of awards for her work as a social entrepreneur in the creative industries over the last eight years. Currently, she is chair of the board of YWCA Scotland – the Young Women's Movement – an organisation focused on building young women’s leadership. She is a data-driven innovation ambassador for the Edinburgh Futures Institute. Follow her on instagram @brianapegado and on Twitter @briana_pegado.

Megan Rudden is a visual artist and writer from Edinburgh with a lifelong interest in the occult. Her ongoing research into the history of witchcraft, mysticism and spirituality has informed much of her interdisciplinary art practice which moves across performance, object making, text and drawing. Megan has performed and exhibited at various locations across the UK and her writing has been published on several platforms since completing postgraduate study in Art Writing at Glasgow School of Art.