Novelist and award-winning Podcaster Lucy Holland joined us last month, in conversation with The Bookery’s own interviewer Alison Sweatman for our first evening event of 2024.

Her new novel, Song of the Huntress recasts the folklore behind the Wild Hunt into a dark, feminist fantasy set in West Country Britain, and features amongst its cast of characters a Christian priest, Winfred of Crediantun, who will be familiar to some as Crediton’s Saint Boniface.

The Wild Hunt myth is an infamous part of the folklore of Britain and much of Europe – a group of ghostly riders accompanied by hunting dogs, they appeared as a portent of disaster during wars and famines, abducting the fallen to the fairy realm or to join the hunt themselves.

During the event, women’s roles in history and fiction was a key point of the discussion, as was a new focus on LGBTQ characters and their frequent exclusion from traditional fantasy novels.

Lucy also elaborated on the role in of Winfred, Crediton’s own Saint Boniface, a key cleric and ‘pagan hunter’ in the narrative’s friction between the early medieval church and the persisting pre-Christian beliefs.

Lucy’s previous novel, The Times bestseller, Sistersong, shortlisted for British Fantasy Award for Best novel in 2022, was a Devon set retelling of the folk ballad ‘The Twa Sisters’ and drew inspiration from the discovery of post Roman remains at Peak Hill above Sidmouth.