Interviewing Kate Macdonald
Hellooo!
How do you like to booktempt people into reading The Shetland Witch?
I’m not very good at it! I can write quite good marketing pitches to lure strangers in, but doing it face to face brings on stage fright and imposter syndrome at the same time. So from this safe distance, I would pitch The Shetland Witch as: come for the northern island magic, mythic creatures, difficult weather and archaeology. Stay for the malignant trow, a confident Fate and a long inheritance of Shetland witchcraft. It’s about women (mostly human) working together to make sure no-one gets hurt and troublemakers are banished. Until even worse adversaries appear and then there’s no knowing what Hazel and Ishabel will do to keep the people they love safe.
What drew you to having the Shetland isles as the key location of the book?
I grew up in Aberdeen so Shetland was almost local. It took effort to get there, but not really much more effort than it took to get to London, so Shetland always felt nearby. And when I went there for the first time in 2019, I was just stunned by the landscape. Long swooping valleys heading north with the glaciers, and even longer voes with views of water and dramatic rock formations in all directions. I read about the lives of Shetland women in earlier centuries and began making up stories about the places I’d been to: Fethaland, Hermaness, a particular close in Lerwick, and the islands’ sense of self-possessed isolation. I’d also read a lot of the history of early settlement on the Atlantic coast, and I was interested in the idea of why sailors would keep going north when they thought they’d already reached the end of known lands. What would the ends of the earth mean to very early sailors?
The story has a feeling that many mythologies are real and cross paths in the Isles for this novel what drew you towards Atropos as a central figure?
Although I began thinking about the story being about witches in modern Shetland, it took me a long time to get to them because I also knew that Atropos would join them. These two elements were not an obvious combination, but that’s the joy of writing: give me two ends of story in different colours and textures and I will knit them together. The Fates may be the only female figures from Classical Greek mythology who have not had a best-selling novel written about them in the past ten years. (I did try but somehow the publishing industry wasn’t interested.) I did a sweep of all the Classical sources online to find out what had been written about them Fates(very little), I read Jane Harrison’s book about the old matriarchal Greek religion that the Olympian pantheon smothered, and I could see the framework of a story about the Fates and Zeus. And then Atropos was hurled into human time and space and she ended up on a wet green slope at the top of Unst, in Shetland. And that’s where she found the witches. I just loved the idea of writing how a Fate would regard the modern world (in very small doses), how she would respond to taps, or Yale locks, or remarks about the church, for example, or how she would think that tarmac roads came about: all things completely outside her experience as an eternal mythic being which she tackles with good humour, common sense and no nonsense. If we can see this world through Atropos’s eyes, we learn about her own experiences and who she is.
What did you want to do differently with witches in this story?
I have always liked stories in which the witches could be living next door and working for the council, or in a library: ordinary, unassuming, friendly, but secretly powerful, and restrained in doing their own thing. Playing with writing the witches’ powers was both great fun and also profoundly logical. Everything has an effect and a reason. Hazel is able to use her science background to understand how the magic works, and she accepts that modern technology doesn’t always connect with magic sliding past it. Ishabel is a very good anatomist, knowing how to heal, but not necessarily how the healing works when she uses her hands to fix a broken body. And I wanted a sense of impending exhaustion. These are overworked women. Ishabel is suffering long covid and (very) old age, Maggie has been too careless for years about who sees her shape-changing, and Avril keeps having a wobbly and running away from the pressures of her two jobs, so the relief these witches feel when Hazel arrives is tremendous. At last, maybe, if she agrees, they might be able to overcome their backlog, if you like, and get back on top of the job they’re supposed to be doing. And then Atropos arrives, to complicate their lives even more.
What else can we expect from you in the future and in this world of weird social media where can we find out more?
On writing, there are two spin-off novellas from The Shetland Witch, published as Stories from The Shetland Witch, so you can get back into that world that way. I’m halfway through a second fantasy novel that is at the moment completely unrelated to The Shetland Witch, but there’s scope for a quiet connection or two in its back story. I’ve got a few short stories submitted and about to be submitted to magazine and collections. They’re all fantasy. I’ve had one science fiction story published but I do not feel comfortable writing about engines and flight trajectories, I’m not interested enough in the science to get it plausibly right. Fantasy writing is where I’m happiest, usually about middle-aged women against the world.
On social media I’m most active on Bluesky (kateem.bsky.social), a bit less active on Insta (@katemacdonaldwrites), I post a lot of things on Substack at https://shetlandwitch.substack.com/, and you can find me at https://peachfieldpress.uk/.
If there was one book, not your own, that you wish you could get everyone to read what would it be and why?
Lolly Willowes by Sylvia Townsend Warner. That’s the classic standard of excellence that I aspire to when writing about witches and practising magic. But I would also recommend Liz Williams’ brilliant novel Comet Weather, about modern magic in an everyday Somerset village.
