Clara Kumagai to guest edit Banshee issue #20

2025 is a big year for Banshee Press: we’ll be celebrating ten years of existence and also publishing our landmark 20th issue. To mark the occasion, we are delighted to welcome acclaimed author (and Banshee contributor!) Clara Kumagai as our fiction editor for issue #20 (autumn/winter 2025).

Clara Kumagai is from Ireland, Japan and Canada. Catfish Rolling, her debut novel, was a 2024 YOTO Carnegie Medal nominee, and winner of the 2024 KPMG Children’s Books Ireland Book of the Year. Her second novel, Songs for Ghosts, is forthcoming in March 2025. She lives and writes in Ireland. She says:

I am delighted to be the guest fiction editor for the 20th issue of Banshee – what an honour to be part of such an anniversary!

The theme I’ve chosen for this issue is ‘Speculative Fiction, or It doesn’t have to be this way’. It was Ursula K. LeGuin who coined this as a simple summary of what fantasy and sci-fi can achieve: a way of looking at the world and ourselves and imagining how else they might be. It is playful, she said, and it is also subversive.

What excites me about speculative fiction is not really magic wands, elves or spaceships, but its ability to examine our world through the lens of another. I want stories that illuminate with a new light; that bring us closer to the familiar through the strange; that demonstrate humanity through what at first appears alien. I hope for fiction that experiments with form as well as content, and pays as much attention to the sentence as the world-building. So send your stories of the uncanny, weird, fabulist; the what-ifs of the past, present or future; of this world or new ones that might be in ways of your own imagining.

Submissions for issue #20 will be open from 1-31 March 2025. Check out the submission guidelines – we look forward to reading your work!