Morgana
Bourggraff
About the Author
Morgana Bourggraff is a Luxembourg-based writer of literary historical fiction. She holds a diploma in creative writing from the University of Oxford. By day, she runs a start-up accelerator for climate finance.
In addition to writing and her career in impact finance, Morgana is a perpetual student and is studying for an MSc in History at the University of Edinburgh.
Works
Fervour
Münster 1534
In the upheaval of the Protestant Reformation, a devout young woman follows a prophet into a city gripped by fervour, where faith curdles into fanaticism, the sacred turns carnal, and one woman’s descent into religious ecstasy crowns her in complicity with the very abuse she once sought to end.
When the Sweating Sickness devastates Holland, ten-year-old Diera prays to live and a voice answers: Fear not, for I have chosen thee. In the years that follow, her belief in that choosing becomes her anchor, binding her to a convent in Amsterdam even as the Reformation tears through Europe. When a fiery prophet of the coming apocalypse sees her through her habit, he calls her chosen too—and she follows him into the doomsday compound of Münster.
But the Kingdom of God is ruled by men and all their hungers. Crowned queen of a besieged theocracy, Diera is exalted and exploited in equal measure: prisoner and accomplice, lover and betrayer, prophet and heretic. As fear, fervour, and fury consume the city, Diera must decide whether it is God she serves, or her own hungry faith.
For readers of Wolf Hall and Matrix, Fervour is a darkly lyrical novel that explores how belief becomes a weapon and how women become complicit in their own subjugation. Drawing on the visionary terror of Revelation, the erotic ache of the Song of Songs, and the apocalyptic grotesque of Hieronymus Bosch, it reimagines one of the strangest episodes of the Reformation through the eyes of the forgotten woman at its heart.
Lady of the Deep
Gaul 57 BC
The black water of the Otherworld is nothing like the druids said it would be in this mythic pre-telling of the Lady of the Lake’s bog-body origin story set during Julius Caesar’s conquest of Gaul and based on the earliest myths that would become the legends of King Arthur.
Donra's world shatters when her warrior brother falls to Caesar's legions and she is sacrificed to the primordial god of the bog in a desperate plea for aid. But the black water of the Otherworld is nothing like the druids said it would be, and the gods do not intervene in the wars of men, no matter how much she pleads. Unwilling to leave her tribe to ruin and let her sacrifice be in vain, Donra sets out on a quest to resurrect her hero brother to lead the revolt against Caesar’s men.
But Donra’s grief and guilt are all-consuming as her journey forces her to confront the lifetime's worth of choices that led her down this path, especially her affair with her brother’s political rival. Every step she takes through the Otherworld tears the veil between realms, unleashing the wrath of gods she only thought she knew, and uncovering a destiny that will transcend centuries.
The Bear Wood
Bastogne 1944
A new mother flees the Battle of the Bulge & races home through the freezing Ardennes forest with her newborn in tow, but in the war-end's apocalyptic ruins, there are no allies or enemies, only battle-twisted men and a creature in the woods.
In the frozen wreckage of the Battle of the Bulge, Anne Blackes’ world burns around her. Her husband lies among the dead, her boy is slick with birth, and somewhere in her, something older than fear says, run.
Anne used to be a fighter, a member of the resistance, but after the Germans annexed Luxembourg resistance cost too much and she followed her husband, conscripted at gunpoint like so many of their neighbors, into the war as a Wehrmacht nurse. Now, with her infant swaddled close, she slips into the woods, moving east toward home or what might be left of it.
But the forest is not the one she remembers. In the teeth of the harshest winter in living memory, the trees groan under an onslaught of ice and shrapnel. Soldiers, scattered and starving, roam the dark like wolves. And something else moves beneath the branches—heavier, hungrier.
Perhaps it’s the blood loss, the fevered dreams of a body undone by birth, or perhaps it’s the madness that sometimes curls around new mothers like smoke, but in the silence between the trees, something breathes.
And it is following her.