Claire North

Claire North is the pen name of British author Catherine Webb, whose Ithaca and other books retell classical myths from female perspectives, and whose speculative fiction has established her as one of the most formally inventive genre writers in Britain.

Claire North is the pen name under which Catherine Webb publishes her more literary and speculative fiction. Writing as Kate Griffin, she produced an acclaimed urban fantasy series set in magical London; as Claire North, she has published novels characterized by formal innovation and philosophical ambition. The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August (2014), her breakthrough as Claire North, is about a man who relives his life from birth each time he dies, retaining memory across each cycle, and who discovers he is not alone.

Touch (2015) is about a being who can move between human bodies, and 84K (2018) is set in a near-future Britain where crime is governed by financial compensation rather than imprisonment — the rich can commit crimes with impunity. Her range within genre fiction is notable: each novel operates from a different premise with different formal constraints.

Ithaca (2022) is narrated by the goddess Hera, watching Penelope’s struggle to maintain control of Ithaca during Odysseus’s absence. A Song for Drowned Souls (2023) continues the series, narrated by the Fates. The classical retellings have given North a format in which her interest in power, gender, and divine indifference find their most natural expression. She writes with economy and formal precision, and her best books have the quality of ideas fully inhabited rather than merely proposed.