Tracy Fahey
Location: Co. Clare
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Bio
Tracy Fahey is an award-winning Irish author of six books. In 2025, she won the Rubery International Book Award for her collection ‘I Spit Myself Out,’ and, in 2024, the Paul Cave Prize For Literature for her novella ‘What Happens At The End.’ Fahey has been a British Fantasy Award finalist in 2017, 2022, and 2024. She has been shortlisted for the London Independent Story Prize and the Leicester Short Story Prize. In 2023 she received a Saari Fellowship in recognition of her work from the Kone Foundation. Her work principally deals with reimagined folklore and female Gothic. Fahey’s short fiction has appeared in fifty Irish, UK, US and Australian anthologies and been reprinted in the British Library ‘Tales of the Weird’ series and Stephen Jones ‘Best New Horror.’ She has been Guest of Honour at the UK Ghost Story Festival and Fantasticon, Denmark. Fahey has appeared on panels, given masterclasses, and spoken at conventions and conferences in Ireland, the UK, Sweden, Italy, the Netherlands, Germany, Finland, and Denmark. Her writing is supported by residencies in Ireland, Scotland, Greece and Finland and by bursaries from Clare and Limerick Arts Offices.
Her most recent book, the feminist folklore novella They Shut Me Up (PS Publishing, 2023) was described by Interzone magazine as ‘a gargantuan ice-breaking ship of a book. Like Angela Carter before her, Tracy Fahey has done something fundamentally new and necessary with old and misunderstood stories.’
Fahey holds a PhD on the Gothic and lectures in creative writing, contemporary Gothic, and folk horror at the Limerick School of Art and Design,
Books
They Shut Me Up (PS Publishing, 2023)
SHORTLISTED FOR A BRITISH FANTASY AWARD 2024
“Life is tough. And then there’s The Change…
A woman, ignored and invisible, starts to discover her voice. But who―or what―is speaking though her?
Part body-horror, part feminist fiction, They Shut Me Up (PS Publishing, 2023) poses the question: how can we retell historic female narratives?
This feminist folklore novella was described by Interzone magazine as ‘a gargantuan ice-breaking ship of a book. Like Angela Carter before her, Tracy Fahey has done something fundamentally new and necessary with old and misunderstood stories.’
Nominated for a British Fantasy Award in 2024 for Best Novella.
New Music For Old Rituals (Black Shuck Books, 2018)
New Music for Old Rituals (2018, Black Shuck Books) brings together a selection of stories that illustrate the pervasive power of the past in the present. Together they present a strange yet familiar country where cautionary tales still serve a purpose; where sacred sites of sea, forest, valley and forts hold power. Where old legends live, and where new myths are born. Within these pages, bog bodies sleep, contagion fought, ghosts linger, and time stutters, fails and turns back on itself.
Six of these stories appeared on US editor Ellen Datlow’s List of Recommended Reading for 2019.
I Spit Myself Out (SHC, 2021)
WINNER OF THE RUBERY INTERNATIONAL BOOK AWARD 2025
SHORTLISTED FOR A BRITISH FANTASY AWARD 2022
Eighteen unsettling narratives map the female experience from puberty to menopause. I Spit Myself Out (2021, SHC) is a collection of female-voiced stories exploring the terror that lurks beneath the surface of the skin.
In this collection, an Anatomical Venus opens to display her organs, clients of a mysterious clinic disappear one by one, a police investigation reveals family secrets, revenge is inked in the skin, and bodies pulsate in the throes of illness, childbirth and religious ritual. Disturbing and provoking in equal turns, I Spit Myself Out reinvents the body as a breeding ground of terrors that resurface inexorably in the present.
Nominated for a British Fantasy Award for Best Collection in 2022.
The Unheimluch Manoeuvre (Boo Books, 2016)
SHORTLISTED FOR A BRITISH FANTASY AWARD 2017
The Unheimlich Manoeuvre (2016, Boo Books, 2nd edition SHC 2018, 3rd edition SHC 2020) is a collection of short stories based around ideas of the domestic uncanny – the Unheimlich. The stories in this collection don’t fall into the conventional ‘haunted house’ bracket, but explore the psychological horror that occurs when home is subverted as a place of safety, when it becomes surreal, changes, and even disappears…
In these stories, a coma patient awakes to find herself replaced by a doppelganger, a ghost estate reflects doubles of both houses and inhabitants, a woman looks for the site of a Gothic atrocity, a suburban enclave takes control of its trespassers, and a beaten woman exacts revenge.
Just as the Heimlich Manoeuvre restores order, health and well-being, the Unheimlich Manoeuvre does quite the opposite.
The Unheimlich Manoeuvre was nominated for a British Fantasy Award in 2017 for Best Collection. The story ‘I Look Like You, I Speak Like You, I Walk Like You’ has featured on several Best Short Story lists, and the film rights for it were acquired in 2021.
Unheimlich Manoeuvres In The Dark (SHC, 2020)
In 2020, a third, expanded version of The Unheimlich Manoeuvre, was released. This book, known as the Deluxe Edition, was released with more stories, an essay on the themes and complete story notes.
Unheimlich Manoeuvres In The Dark is a mini-collection that collects together all the additional material that featured in this third edition : the essay Creative Evocations of Uncanny Domestic Spaces, five new stories including three never before published (Haunted By The Ghost, That Thing I Did, The Wrong House, Possession & I Wait For You), reproduction of a print by Fahey with explanation, entitled Remembering Wildgoose Lodge, and story notes on all stories from the complete Deluxe Edition.
The Girl In The Fort (2017, Fox Spirit Books)
‘Your actions affect others; you are very powerful.’ For a second her eyes seem to glaze over, her voice deepens. ‘You hold a great fate in your hands, and no-one can tell what way it will turn. It is all within you, but there are dark shadows around you…’
This middle-grade novella tells the story of eleven year old Vivian, who, after her father takes a job abroad, is sent from Dublin to stay with her grandparents in their ramshackle family home in the countryside. At first she fiercely resents abandoning city life and her friends – but reluctantly finds herself becoming attracted to the strange fairy fort in a nearby field, and the odd secrets it holds. But spending too much time in the fort can be a dangerous thing, as Vivian and her new friends Katie and Tommy find out. As the long, hot summer unfolds, Vivian sees her grandmother’s folk tales come to life, experiences the complicated joys of witnessing the past, and forges new relationships with her family.
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