Clare Pollard, The Modern Fairies

Award-winnning poet and playwright, Clare Pollard, will discuss her brilliant and bawdy, romantic and provocative, dazzling novel, The Modern Fairies which is inspired by real events, about the delights and dangers of storytelling in dark times.

Saturday 21st June, 2.30pm

Venue: St Leonard-at-the-Hythe Church, Hythe Hill, Colchester, CO1 2NP

Tickets: £12 per event / £10 concessions (Students, Under 27s and Unwaged).
All 3 events for £30 / £26 concessions

Box Office: essexbookfestival.org.uk or Mercury Theatre 01206 573948

Part of Spirits, Salons & Sanctuary

Ticket Deal

The Modern Fairies by Clare Pollard

‘A novel with oodles of charm’ – The Times

‘Elegant, decadent, vulgar, clever, enchanting and dark’ – Sarah Perry, author of Enlightenment

Versailles, 1682: a city of the rich, a living fairy-tale, Louis XIV’s fever dream. It’s a place of opulence, beauty, and power. But strip back the lavish exterior of polite society, and you’ll find a dark undercurrent of sexual intrigue and vicious gossip. Nobody is safe here – no matter how highly born they are.

No one knows this better than Madame Marie d’Aulnoy. Each week, a rogue group of intellectuals gather at her Parisian home to debate, flirt and perform Contes de Fées – fairy tales – that challenge the status quo, at a salon that will change the course of literature forever. But while they weave tales of glass slippers, enchanted beasts and long-haired princesses, a wolf is lurking, who threatens to destroy the members of the salon one by one.

Brilliant and bawdy, romantic and provocative, The Modern Fairies is a dazzling novel inspired by real events, about the delights and dangers of storytelling in dark times.

‘Funny, filthy, dancingly clever … A delectable confection of many-layered pleasures … I gobbled it all up.’ – Joanna Quinn, author of The Whalebone Theatre

‘The sentences sing on the page with wit and intelligence … Reminds the reader of the enduring power of storytelling to transform and even save lives, then and now’ – The New York Times

Order a copy of The Modern Fairies by Clare Pollard at the Essex Book Festival online bookshop at bookshop.org

Clare Pollard

Photo of Clare Pollard credit Sophie Davidson

Clare Pollard is an award-winning poet and playwright based in London. She is the author of five poetry collections and the former Editor of the Modern Poetry in Translation magazine. Her first novel, Delphi, was published by Fig Tree in 2022. The Modern Fairies is her second novel.

Clare Pollard will be in conversation with Holly Pester

Holly Pester is a poet and writer. She has worked in sound art and performance, with BBC Radio, Women’s Art Library and Wellcome Collection.