Kilkenny’s Toil & Trouble presents "Bright I Burn": Molly Aitken, hosted by Anya Bergman

Seven hundred years ago, a Kilkenny woman was condemned as a witch. The records that survive were written by the men who prosecuted her. Alice Kyteler’s own voice is nowhere in them.

"Bright I Burn" gives it back to her. Molly Aitken’s novel, a New Yorker and BBC Best Book of 2024, and shortlisted for the Royal Society of Literature’s Encore Prize, imagines Alice from the inside: an innkeeper’s daughter who took over her father’s trade and grew it, built a fortune in a city that had no place for a wealthy woman, married four times and outlived three husbands, and found that the gossip trailing her money could harden, in the end, into a charge that carried a death sentence.

In this intimate reading and conversation in the Parade Tower at Kilkenny Castle, hosted by novelist Anya Bergman, Aitken brings medieval Kilkenny to life and opens up the questions underneath the story. How does a community decide that one of its own has become dangerous? What is the difference between a woman with power and a woman to be feared? And what does it take to recover a voice that history worked hard to erase?

Aitken grew up on the south coast of Ireland. Her debut novel, "The Island Child", was longlisted for the Authors’ Club First Novel Award. Her short fiction has appeared in The New Yorker and Ploughshares, where it won the Alice Hoffman Prize for Fiction, and in Banshee, and has been dramatised for BBC Radio 4. She writes about Alice as both novelist and researcher, and she does it here in the city where Alice lived and traded.

Anya Bergman is the Irish author of international bestsellers "The Witches of Vardø" — raising the lost voices of women accused in Norway’s Finnmark witch trials — and "The Tarot Reader of Versailles". She has been shortlisted for the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year and the Wilbur Smith Adventure Writing Prize. Anya comes to Alice’s city as a reader of trial records herself.

Look deeper. Ask why. Challenge the story.

Supported by Kilkenny County Council and Tourism Ireland.

Kilkenny is a Tourism Ireland Home of Halloween Destination 2024–2027.