Kate Macdonald

I have a great fondness for Isak Dinesen’s strange and Scandinavian short stories.

It was suggested that I might like to review Crafting a Path Through Illness, subtitled Exploring Creativity While Chronically Ill.

I went to Portmeirion: it is amazing, an architectural jewel-box that works.

I bought this at the Gwen John exhibition in Cardiff, intrigued that an artist was writing to a dead artist about their lives.

For those of you who are interested, my new novel Radical Magic comes out on 1st September, and it’s available for reading and requesting on NetGalley right now!

I despaired of finding a copy of Spent until I saw it stacked on an unreachably high shelf in the Bristol branch of Forbidden Planet.

A longer version of this review will be published in the Ancillary Review of Books sometime later in 2026, but here’s the short version.

Not knowing anything about Italian literature I am reviewing here with trepidation, since I suspect that Sapienza is not a figure of enormous international popularity like Elena Ferrante, but relatively obscure, known mainly to Americans writing graduate…

Some years ago I went thoroughly into Margaret Irwin’s Tudor novels, and liked almost all of them.

Most cleverly the V&A began some years ago to bring out new editions of memoirs by figures from the fashion world.