Until Banshee was born, woman always cast as mothers, warriors or witches, were never given the lead. Banshee transports you to treacherous landscapes and salt-crashing seas. generational curses and mystical islands. Here you’ll find unruly mothers, rule-breaking queens, and women outrunning their destiny- stories pulsing with desire, danger and defiance. Banshee is a celebration of womanhood- and an homage to the ancient storeis that still shape us.

In the traditional tale, Cliodhna is a goddess who falls in love with a human, is drowned by a wave that has been summoned by the god of the sea and becomes a wave herself. But Griffin shifts the focus to empower her protagonist. Hers is one of the 10 stories in Banshee, a collection of myths, legends and fairy tales reimagined by contemporary women writers from across the island or with Irish roots.

The book’s editor Ailbhe Malone, grew up on stories of Ireland’s ancient warriors and goddesses but railed at how they found themselves at the mercy of men and fate. In her introduction she writes: “My brief to these authors was simple rewrite these legends so that the women are fulcrums of the stories, rather than the levers”.

Banshee- the name emerged from the mythical shrieking spirit and harbinger of death- draws on talents of authors including Jess Kidd, Naoise 
Dolan, Megan Nolan, and Nikita Gill. Their overhauled stories make an uplifting counterpoint to the endless misogyny in the news cycle: the women here have agency and through they may at times be frightened, they are fierce ferocious.

Macha as brought to life by Northern Irish writer Wendy Erskine. “can still drive a getaway car faster than any motherf*****”  despite being about to give birth to twins. Ersking is mordant. In the myth, Macha leaves the underworld  and takes a human lover but casts a curse on men after he reveals that she could outrace the king’s horses. Erskine’s revamped Macha oozes disdain: the men here are already pitiful.

Irish-Egyptian writer Salma El-Wardany takes the “Deirdre of the sorrows” legend – a doomed romance about the price a beautiful woman pays for her freedom that has inspired JM Synge, William Butler Yeats and George William Russell- and sets the events in an Irish mother-and-baby home. Despite losing her true love, Deirdre exacts revenge on her priest tormentor then returns to her daughter vowing: “There is still a life worth living”.

Crime writer Jane Casey’s “The changeling”. Which toys with the reader before flipping the traditional script of a fairy snatching and swapping a baby. No spoilers, but it is a triumph for wives tormented by monstrous men. Gill, a Belfast-born, British-Indian poet, has already retold fables in her own Fierce Fairytales (2018).  “ A Most Deceiving Woman”, her take on a tale of a mortal who woos a god with poetry before dying in battle, recasts Credhe as a “self-made goddess” who sees the curse of mortality as a blessing.

Women’s rights have come a long way in Ireland, as the country trumpets its progress in gender equality and the feat day of its patroness, St Brigid, is now a public holiday.

Banshee: Mythological Irish Women Retold edited by Ailbhe Malone, John Murray £22, 302 pages.