Story of young woman accused of witchcraft wins $100,000 book award

Margaret River-based author Bernice Barry has won the $100,000 ARA Historical Novel Prize for her book about a woman being pursued by a witch-hunter, The Names of a Hare.

It is the story of an unnamed woman living in Cornwall in the 17th century, a time when witches could be burned at the stake.

Barry's protagonist is the daughter of a priest, taught by her housekeeper from a young age about natural cures and magic. She also learns she has a special power of her own where she can float above her body and travel great distances.

When someone shares her secret, she is accused of witchcraft and forced to flee.

Barry, 73, was born in Cornwall and moved to Australia 25 years ago. She says winning the Historical Novel Prize is validating after 15 years writing for a mostly Western Australian audience.

"My books have been bestsellers in WA, but I don't sell a lot of books," she says. "It's a fairly niche area I've been writing in: the stories of forgotten women, history, botany.

"To be acknowledged in this way means the world to me."

The judges, chaired by publisher and editor Linda Funnell, described Barry's writing as "work[ing] like a spell, building slowly and imperceptibly, attentively describing the natural world and the lives of rural folk in a time of great historical turmoil".

"This is a novel of quiet power that lingers in the mind," the judges said.

The ARA Historical Novel Prize, awarded by the Historical Novel Society Australasia to novels set more than 50 years ago, is one of Australia's richest literary prizes.

The prize also awards $30,000 to a book for younger readers. Meg Caddy won this year for their young adult novel A Flash in the Dust about two young people escaping from Fremantle Asylum.

Wayne Marshall won the $5,000 Readers' Choice Award for his novel Henry Goes Bush, which turns the story of Henry Lawson's banishment to Bourke in 1892 into a surreal odyssey.

Barry says the most important thing about winning the top prize is the opportunity for "my little book to get to more readers".

"That is the reason I write," she says.

"It feels like a magical connection [with the reader]. It's the magic of words; the magic of sharing a story."

Writing a neurodivergent protagonist

In The Names of a Hare, the unnamed narrator is at the end of her life, looking back and sharing her story and what she has learned.

Writing the book was an opportunity for Barry to do the same.

"I wanted to convey some of the things that have been on my mind for many years," she says.

When living in England's Midlands and feeling homesick for Cornwall, Barry started to write a short story. More than 30 years later, those pages became the prologue of The Names of a Hare.

But the inspiration for her protagonist goes back even further, to being nine years old and reading RD Blackmore's historical novel Lorna Doone.

She recalls being fascinated by a minor character, who was based on a real woman and dubbed Mother Meldrum.

"I wondered about this old woman who was a healer from Cornwall," Barry says. "Nobody knew her name, and they were afraid of her, but they needed her."

Barry's protagonist, also unnamed, is a neurodivergent woman who avoids eye contact, flinches from touch and is averse to loud noises.

They are qualities borrowed from her own experiences.

"Life was difficult for me as a young woman because I knew I was different," she says.

"I was strange, I was weird, and I spent a lot of time masking. I spent a lot of time thinking it was all my fault.

"I would never have talked about those things until probably two or three years ago, and I wouldn't want anyone else to go through life hiding something that is so discomforting."

It was not something Barry initially set out to include, but when she was about 10,000 words into the manuscript, she realised what she was doing.

"I was thinking, 'There must have been women like me in the 17th century,'" she says.

"It must have been very hard, where people would just look at her and say, 'She's different; she must be a witch.'"

Why witches?

Barry's novel is one of a spate of recent books exploring ideas around magic and witchcraft, including Lucianne Tonti's Good Witch and Kaz Cooke's Spooky Ladies.

They are being released as more young women try out "witchy" things like manifestation, crystal-collecting and solstice rituals.

Barry suggests this interest may stem from young women feeling confident to speak out about misogyny — the same social ill that fuelled the witch trials that form the backdrop of The Names of a Hare.

"I wonder if we'll ever be free of it; of that way of viewing women that makes some people feel women take away their power," she says.

That way of viewing women is something she describes in the novel.

"Having the skill to remove pain and restore good health, that's power, and power in the hands of a woman is not a thing men can swallow easy like a slippery syllabub," she writes.

Barry sees that renewed sense of confidence, paired with "witchy" rituals, as part of a cycle she also recalls from her early adulthood, when she was a student in London.

"The late 1960s and early 1970s was a time when there was a similar wave of confidence and a united feeling of women being able to speak out and do something about [misogyny]," she says.

That united feeling is also in the novel.

"It's about the steadfastness of women and friendship; the way we always turn up for one another," Barry says.

Still, the author would prefer for the reader to decide for themselves if her unnamed protagonist is a witch or not.

"Was this woman a witch or was she someone who had a natural ability for healing?"