Alan Bissett

This Open Fund award will allow me to focus on writing my fifth novel The Coven and the Drowners, my first full-length prose work since 2011. The book follows the lives of four women in a rural Scottish village who, for their differing reasons, are attracted to witchcraft and form a contemporary coven, drawing unwelcome attention from some of the other villagers. The term ‘witch hunt’ is frequently employed as a political metaphor, but I want to ask in narrative form whether or not present-day misogyny and anti-Enlightenment values might make a literal witch-hunt possible again.

I intend to use several different linguistic registers to bring out the varying cultural backgrounds of the coven, including literary English, vernacular Scots and Gaelic, and will explore themes of patriarchal oppression, female empowerment, and the lost connection between our postmodern, consumerist society and nature, which the coven — seeking deeper links to our pagan past — are looking to restore. But this brings dangers. I want to explore how witchcraft looks and feels in the social-media age and how much of the mindset which fuelled 17th Century witch-trials remains in our politically-tribal, contemporary age.

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