Books
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From Spare Oom to War Drobe: Travels in Narnia with my nine year-old self
"Those of us who have visited Narnia through the books so often that we could recite our favourite moments and sentences, might not think that there is anything new waiting for us. Katherine Langrish … takes us around a place we thought we knew and makes it finer and more interesting than it was before.” - Neil Gaiman
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Seven Miles of Steel Thistles
Steel Thistles Press
A collection of my essays on fairy tales and folklore. The title is borrowed from an Irish fairy tale in which the hero gallops his pony over ‘seven miles of hill on fire, and seven miles of steel thistles, and seven miles of sea.’
Essays and Papers
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Coming of Age as a Viking: Historical Children’s Books and Gender
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Inevitable Tales
Unsettling Wonder: Papaveria Press
'Kismet - fate, destiny, quadr, karma, doom, wyrd - across the world these similar yet subtly different concepts have sprung up as responses to the same anxiety. They reassure us that whatever good or evil may befall is somehow meant to be: intended, written in the stars. Kismet is the opposite of luck. Luck is happenstance, the random fall of the dice. Kismet is destiny ordained by a higher power...'
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‘Maid Maleen’: A Fairy-Tale Study of Trauma
In this essay I look at the Grimms' tale 'Maid Maleen', a fairy story that delves unusually deeply into the trauma caused by abandonment and suffering.
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The Weirdstone of Talybont
'I was in South Wales, standing on a real hill with a real stone in my hand, imaginatively inhabiting a children’s book I read for the first time in 1965, which has stayed with me ever since.'
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Gnomes
Unlocking Press
Written for the academic collection 'New Fairy Tales', 'Gnomes' is a short story for adults with touches of mild horror and black comedy. Harold and Evelyn live blameless lives in their neat home on Laburnum Avenue - until the neighbour over the road plants his front garden out with gnomes.
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Exchanging Certainty for Uncertainty: Mervyn Peake Explores the Realms of Children’s Fiction
A personal and emotional response to Mervyn Peake’s work for children, especially 'Letters From a Lost Uncle' and 'Captain Slaughterboard Drops Anchor'.