From Shakespeare's Banquo to Casper the Friendly Ghost, stories of spectres, phantoms and apparitions have entertained for centuries. However, in the hands of Moniza Alvi, Anita Desai and Karen McCarthy, the traditions of the ghost story are manipulated, twisted and turned on their head, offering the reader a new interpretation of a classic genre. Desai maintains some of the conventions - a creaky house on a hill, spooky goings-on, a lone, intimidated heroine - but her ghosts are ambiguous and we have difficulty negotiating them. Alvi and McCarthy revisit the spectre of those once living, in Alvi's case Degas and his beautiful ballerinas, while McCarthy's grimmer ghosts are those who have perished in genocides across centuries.

Moniza Alvi pays homage to Degas and his models in a beautiful poem surveying the world inhabited by Degas and his models. Alvi's writing is evocative and resonant, capturing the essence of a specific time, a specific place.

Anita Desai's lingering and elegant short story tells of a woman's attempt to settle into her new home. She begins to feel less and less comfortable, especially when around the landing, and she realises that her longed-for solitude is proving elusive. A chilling and melancholy story where little is what it seems to be.

Karen McCarthy's shocking and disturbing poem investigates humankind's potential for extraordinary, systematic brutality, and the attempts that we make to explain and understand our actions. Inspired by exhibits at London's Imperial War Museum, she brings a personal response to the horrors of genocide.

Moniza Alvi

Moniza Alvi was born in Pakistan and grew up in England. She has published five books of poetry, including a compendium collection, Carrying My Wife (Bloodaxe, 2000), and How the Stone Found Its Voice (Bloodaxe, 2005). She received a Cholmondeley Award for poetry in 2002.

Photo: Bob Coe

Anita Desai

Anita Desai was born and educated in India. She is the author of several novels, of which three, Clear Light of Day, In Custody and Fasting, Feasting, were shortlisted for the Booker Prize. In Custody was filmed by Merchant Ivory Productions. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She is an Honorary Fellow of Girton College and Clare Hall, Cambridge University, and an Emeritus Professor of the Humanities at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Karen McCarthy

Karen McCarthy has presented her work at a variety of venues, including the Barbican and the South Bank Centre in London, Bath Literature Festival and the International Festival of Women in Slovenia. Her poetry is published in books, magazines, in the London Underground and on a bottle of single-malt whisky.  Spread the Word published her chapbook, The Worshipful Company of Pomegranate Slicers, to conclude her residency there in 2005. She is a contributing editor at the literary journal Wasafiri and has edited two critically acclaimed anthonologies, Bittersweet: Contemporary Black Women's Poetry (Women's Press 1998) and Kin (Serpent's Tail 2004).

Illustration © Maurizio Marmorato