In Conversation: Sally O’Reilly and Naomi Kelsey

As part of our Year of Reading Summer program, Newcastle Libraries brings together Sally O'Reilly, Hagtale (2025), and Naomi Kelsey, Pale Mistress (2026), to discuss common themes in their work. Both authors have taken inspiration from Shakespeare to write their own dark fairytale and historical thriller based on his work. Drawing on themes of witchcraft, the supernatural, M**der and vengeance, the authors foreground the women's voices that are so often left out of the story.

This event will include a Q&A, book sale and book signing.

Hagtale

In eleventh-century Scotland, feral wolf-child Wulva is brought up by witches but sent to live at a Scottish castle where she falls under the spell of ambitious and cruel Lord Macbeth. Three hundred years later, gentle Brother Rowan goes on a perilous journey to a remote and ancient monastery to write a history of the Scottish king-line. Misfits in their own time, seekers after truth, Wulva and Rowan are mysteriously connected.Hagtale explores the power of stories lost and found, their redemptive power, and who gets to tell the tale.

Pale Mistress

Cyprus, 16th century. M**der, lies and vengeance has left lovers dead, promises broken and no one to trust. Only one woman survives, Bianca.

The slain? History knows their names: Emilia, Desdemona, Othello.

But why do we not know Bianca? Who was the pale mistress? Liar or lied to? Instigator or victim? In telling one woman’s story, Naomi Kelsey dazzlingly recasts a Shakespearean tragedy as a psychological thriller of jealousy and gaslighting, ambition and envy, and the making and breaking of one of Shakespeare’s most notorious villains, Iago.

Sally O’Reilly is the author of four novels, published by Penguin Books, Myriad Editions/Picador US and Scribe UK/Australia, and the nonfiction guide How to be a Writer (Piatkus). She has freelanced for the Guardian, Sunday Times and Evening Standard and worked as a senior lecturer in creative writing at the Open University. Sally is currently a Royal Literary Fund Fellow at Aston University. An avid reader all her life, she has retained her childhood fascination with magic and the supernatural. Her stories celebrate lost knowledge and forgotten women’s voices

Naomi Kelsey's debut novel, The Burnings, was published by Harper North in 2023, followed by The Darkening Globe in 2025. Her next book, Pale Mistress, a reimagining of Shakespeare's 'Othello', will be published in July 2026. She is the winner of two Northern Writers’ Awards and of the HWA Dorothy Dunnett Competition 2021. Her fiction has been published in Mslexia magazine and shortlisted for several further awards including the Bridport Prize and the Bristol Prize. She posts about books, history, and the chaos of writing around small children and teaching English on Instagram as @naomikelseybooks and on X as @naomikelsey_ and writes a monthly-ish newsletter on Substack at @naomikelsey

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