_{Picture: Simone Falk}

Kirsty Logan’s latest novel may be titled Now She Is Witch, but the question of who exactly practises witchcraft remains ambiguous. Does herbalism or performing magic spells make you a witch? Is a vengeful woman a witch or one who lives alone? Are witches good or bad? What, if anything, is a witch? 

‘I don’t think the book answers the question,’ says Logan. ‘For a long time, the narrative was that witches are evil, they eat babies, they make pacts with the devil. Then there was this backlash: it’s misogyny under a different name, an attack on traditional healing and midwives. I think both of these are too simplistic.’ Today the witch is a feminist icon, inspiring the slogan ‘we are the daughters of the witches they couldn’t burn’. But is this image of rebellious heroism always accurate? Logan thinks not. ‘Why does a witch have to be this innocent midwife healer who would never hurt anyone?’ she says. ‘What I wanted to say in this book is what if they’re not evil? What if they’re not innocent either?’

Logan compulsively disrupts such binaries. In her earlier novels The Gracekeepers and The Gloaming, mermaids treading land and water were allegories for fluid genders and sexualities. ‘Growing up, I didn’t have the word “queer”,’ says Logan. ‘Mermaids, selkies and werewolves appealed to me because they exist in two worlds.’ Mermaids appear like Easter eggs throughout Now She Is Witch, while a non-binary romance signals the joy of inhabiting grey areas.

Another fairytale theme Logan reprises is absent mothers. Some characters grapple with their inability to become a mother at all. ‘Isn’t it strange that the first book I wrote since becoming a parent is about someone who can’t biologically be one? A lot of that came from my wife and I. We wanted to give birth to one child each but that was not our path. It made me think about what that meant. Obviously to us, it meant nothing. But some people at that time, maybe even at this time, would see one of us as a more true woman.’

Protagonist Lux doesn’t menstruate, which, in the book’s medieval setting, could mark her as a witch. ‘Witch is completely “other”. It’s not woman. It’s not mother,’ says Logan. ‘I think that’s why we’re coming to these narratives so much at the moment. We’re looking at this process of othering. Why do we other people? Who gets othered? What happens when they are othered? A huge amount of atrocities throughout history have happened because someone decided another group is not fully human.’

Now She Is Witch is published by Harvill Secker on Thursday 12 January.