Kate Young | Contributors to Slightly Foxed literary review magazine

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Kate Young is an award-winning writer and cook. She is the author of The Little Library Cookbook and The Little Library Year, cookbooks which take inspiration from literature.

The numbers in square brackets refer to the issue of the quarterly in which the article appears.
The unbracketed numbers refer to the starting page of the article.
For entries in multiple issues of the quarterly, the occurrences are separated by semi-colons.

articles by, [66] 19; [68] 15; [79] 15

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Such Devoted Sisters

Kate Young on Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle

I read Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962) one summer as a teenager. It’s a work of gothic horror, and a mystery novel. More specifically, it’s a strange, haunting story about a town that fears and is obsessed by two of its residents following the fatal poisoning of their family. I have always thought of it as a book about sisters, about Merricat and Constance, ‘two halves of the same person’. Endlessly self-absorbed, I spent my first reading thinking of my own sister. Our relationship was the most important and the most constant in my life, as we moved back and forth between the homes of our divorced parents. And so, of course, in the heat of the summer, with my sister my main source of company, I felt that this book had been written specifically for me.

Food in books: Eccles cakes from Cider with Rosie by Laurie Lee | The Little Library Café

Kate Young

While preparing for a trip to ‘Laurie Lee country’ – the Cotswolds – Kate Young bakes a batch of Eccles cakes, enjoyed by the author in his childhood. We lined up in the cold, not noticing the cold, waiting for…

Episode 32: Picnic at Hanging Rock & Other Stories

The Slightly Foxed Podcast

‘Whether Picnic at Hanging Rock is fact or fiction, my readers must decide for themselves.’ It’s a scorching St Valentine’s Day in 1900 when three boarding-school girls and a teacher disappear during a day-trip to Hanging Rock in the arid Australian outback. Fact or fiction? Misadventure or murder? Accident or assassination? Join us on our latest literary podcast adventure as we delve into the mystery, history and hysteria of Joan Lindsay’s classic Australian Gothic novel with Kate Young, author of The Little Library Cookbook. From the slow-seeping horror of Hanging Rock to coming-of-age tales of tuck boxes and midnight feasts, high jinks and humour, Kate guides the Slightly Foxed magazine team through the school-story tradition and asks why it’s such fertile ground for fiction. On the way we visit the Chalet School, Malory Towers and St Trinian’s, and slip into darker territory with Decline and Fall, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go.

Golden Fire

Kate Young on Laurie Lee, Cider with Rosie

I write these words, appropriately enough, in The Woolpack – the Slad pub that once claimed Laurie Lee as its most famous patron – with a pint of cider at my elbow. From one window, the view dips down into a valley, and you can see a path that leads into Stroud, where Lee was born in 1914. From the other, the churchyard, where he is buried beneath the words ‘He lies in the valley he loved’, is just visible. The cider I am drinking is, inevitably, pressed from local apples: ‘golden fire, wine of wild orchids and of that valley and that time and of Rosie’s burning cheeks’. It feels, as it often does in The Woolpack, as if the connections with the past, those generations before me who called this place home, are tangible ones, worn into the dark, musty, cider-soaked fabric of the place.

Hazy Memories of Hanging Rock

Kate Young on Joan Lindsay, Picnic at Hanging Rock

I have been reading aloud from Picnic at Hanging Rock for three hours when my friend touches the window beside her. I do the same; given the blasting air-conditioning, it seems impossible that the glass could be so hot. But it is – we have left behind the breezes of the coast, and the cooling altitude of the mountains. This is the Australian outback, 400 kilometres south-west of Canberra, and it is 44 degrees in the shade. We pull over and step out, and the heat hits us like a wall.

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