10:30 — Witches and Folklore: Anna Caig · Molly Aitken · Sally O'Reilly @ The Chapel

📍 Sunday 26th April 10:30 - 11:30 at the Victoria's Chapel

Join Anna Caig, Molly Aitken and Sally O'Reilly as they explore fiery folklore and wild witches in this panel event.

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Anna Caig is obsessed with the hidden voices of women and a compelling underdog story. Luckily, history offers plenty of these. She’s inspired by the glimpses into a woman’s life we get before the historical record moves onto something considered much more important. What was happening in these gaps? Anna lives in the ‘howling wilderness’ of the Peak District and has worked in marketing for over 20 years. She believes reading is the most fun it’s possible to have - some of her best memories are of the books she’s read; some of her best friends and biggest loves are fictional. Writing is the only thing she can do and not feel like she should be doing something else. Her debut novel, The Wise Witch of Orkney, was published in February 2026.

Molly Aitken was born in Scotland and brought up in Ireland. Her short fiction has appeared in Ploughshares, for which she won the Alice Hoffman Prize for Fiction 2023, Banshee, and has been dramatized for BBC Radio 4. Her first novel The Island Child was longlisted for the Authors’ Club Best First Novel Award. Molly is currently studying for a PhD in Creative Writing and History at Sheffield Hallam University.

Sally O’Reilly is a writer based in Sheffield. Her latest novel Hagtale: A Macbeth Origin Story (Scribe, 2025) is a dark fairy tale which retells Shakespeare’s play Macbeth from the perspective of a feral witch and a fourteenth century monk who is attempting to find a document which records the Scottish king-line. It contrasts the story Shakespeare tells with the lost hag’s version, an oral history which has been forgotten. 

She works as a Royal Literary Fund Fellow at Aston University, where she advises students about academic writing, and is a member of the Writers Workshop in Sheffield, where she runs workshops on all aspects of fiction. Sally is a Cosmopolitan new journalist of the year, and her short stories have been published in the UK, Australia and South Africa, and shortlisted for prizes including the Cosmopolitan and Ian St James award. She has also worked as a creative writing lecturer for The Open University, Brunel University and the University of Portsmouth, and she has an MA (Distinction) and a PhD in Creative Writing, both from Brunel University.