Kaite Welsh

Is Sarah Connolly your musical crush? Are you going to Glyndebourne when all your friends are off to Glastonbury? Do you look at women in trousers and assume she’s a mezzo? Ever reblogged a gif of Christine Rice?

I’m writing an article for the Guardian about Tumblr opera fandom and how there’s a burgeoning queer female audience that the opera world needs to start catering for. If you’re interested in talking about your love of mezzos, drop me a line at [email protected] (pseudonyms can be provided!)

There’s something incredibly disturbing in the fact that my article about choosing my high school because it reminded me of Miss Cackle’s Academy in The Worst Witch came out the day after ‘What a woman will do for a good f*ck’: Julia Cotton’s sexual agency in Hellraiser, my essay on the sexy, murderous Clive Barker antiheroine played by....the current CBBC/Netflix Miss Cackle and a week after I publicly asserted in the Guardian that Miss Hardbroom is a lesbian.

I had a brilliant time interviewing the wonderful Catherine Russell for DIVA a few months ago, and it hit the newsstands yesterday! You can also get it online.

Set in 1890s Edinburgh, the Sarah Gilchrist mysteries feature a sleuthing fallen woman-turned-female medical student, and will thrill fans of Sarah Waters and Antonia Hodgson. 

Sarah Gilchrist has fled from London to Edinburgh in disgrace and is determined to become a doctor, despite the misgivings of her family and society. As part of the University of Edinburgh’s first intake of female medical students, Sarah comes up against resistance from lecturers, her male contemporaries, and - perhaps worst of all - her fellow women, who will do anything to avoid being associated with a fallen woman.

When one of Sarah’s patients turns up in the university dissecting room as a battered corpse, Sarah finds herself drawn into Edinburgh’s dangerous underworld of bribery, brothels and body snatchers - and a confrontation with her own past…

Look at this pretty thing! It’s been out in hardback since last year, but the paperback release is giving me all sorts of feels. It’s published in the UK by Tinder Press and by Pegasus Books in the US where the paperback is out March 13th, which is both my nephew’s second birthday and nearly two years to the day that I signed my very first book deal (I legit thought my dad was going to spontaneously combust with pride. Imagine the cross between Jeremy Corbyn and the heart eye emoji and you’ve basically got it).

Stick around around for news, pictures of badass Victorian women like Sophia Jex-Blake and snippets of The Unquiet Heart, book 2 in the Sarah Gilchrist mysteries.