Toil & Trouble 2026: 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? Look deeper. Ask why. Challenge the story.

Price: €10 + €1.50 booking fee.
Age: 16+ (Under 18s must be accompanied by an adult.)
Accessibility information: This venue is wheelchair accessible.