Macdonald, Kate
Entry updated 7 September 2025. Tagged: Author, Editor.
(1964- ) UK academic, editor, publisher and author, with the University of Ghent between 2006 and 2015. Nonfiction studies include several works on John Buchan, beginning with John Buchan: A Companion to the Mystery Fiction (2009), a central focus here being a convincing attempt to represent Buchan in a context free of the tired consensus that his fiction fatally reflected the Imperialism and racism (see Race in SF) of his era, and that he was unduly careless in the crafting of the thrillers for which he is now primarily remembered; the essays assembled in Reassessing John Buchan: Beyond The Thirty Nine Steps (anth 2009) and John Buchan and the Idea of Modernity (anth 2013) argue convincingly for a new understanding. She is perhaps most significant as a publisher/editor for her founding and managing of The Handheld Press from 2017 until its closing in 2025; about a third of its titles are Fantastika, including the first unexpurgated edition in 2017 of Rose Macaulay's What Not: A Prophetic Comedy (1918).
Macdonald began to publish fiction of genre interest with "The Adaptation Point" in Shoreline of Infinity for Autumn 2019; her first novel, The Shetland Witch (2025), is supernatural. [JC]
Kate Macdonald
born Norwich, Norfolk: 22 July 1964
works
- The Shetland Witch (Malvern, Worcestershire: The Peachfield Press, 2025) [pb/]
nonfiction
- John Buchan: A Companion to the Mystery Fiction (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland and Company, 2009) [nonfiction: pb/]
- Novelists Against Social Change: Conservative Popular Fiction, 1920-1960 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015) [nonfiction: John Buchan; Dornford Yates: hb/]
works as editor: fiction
- Political Future Fiction: Speculative and Counter-Factual Politics in Edwardian Fiction (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2013) [anth: published in three volumes: includes novels by Samuel Barton, John Buchan, Robert William Cole, by Joseph Conrad with Ford Madox Hueffer (see Ford Madox Ford), Allan Reeth, Una L Silberrad: hb/]
- Several Worlds: A Middleoak Anthology (Malvern, Worcestershire: The Peachfield Press, 2025) [anth: pb/]
works as editor: nonfiction (selected)
- Reassessing John Buchan: Beyond The Thirty Nine Steps (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2009) [nonfiction: anth: hb/]
- The Masculine Middlebrow: What Mr Miniver Read (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011) [nonfiction: anth: pb/]
- John Buchan and the Idea of Modernity (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2013) [nonfiction: anth: pb/]
- Transitions in Middlebrow Writing, 1880-1930 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015) [nonfiction: anth: pb/]
- Rose Macaulay, Gender, and Modernity (London: Routledge, 2018) [nonfiction: anth: Rose Macaulay: pb/]
links
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