Titania McGrath (@TitaniaMcGrath) is a parody Twitter account created and run by Andrew Doyle, an Irish comedian and Spiked columnist. Doyle describes her as "a militant vegan who thinks she is a better poet than William Shakespeare". As of March 2021, the character has more than 600,000 followers. Using this pseudonym, Doyle wrote a book, Woke: A Guide to Social Justice, which was published on 7 March 2019. His second book under the name, My First Little Book of Intersectional Activism, was published in September 2020. He also created a live comedy show featuring Titania (played by Alice Marshall), which debuted at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in August 2019.
Character The fictional Titania Gethsemane McGrath is a 24-year-old "radical intersectionalist poet committed to feminism, social justice and armed peaceful protest" who identifies as non-binary, "polyracial" and ecosexual. In an interview with The Spectator, the persona revealed that she was raised by parents who "lavished" her with "gifts and money" to distract her from her "oppression". She became woke through the Bible passage of the Cleansing of the Temple, which inspired her to "a similar thing" at the age of four at her local branch of HSBC. She studied Modern Languages at Oxford University before completing an MA in gender studies, for which she wrote "a groundbreaking dissertation on technopaganism and the corrosive nature of cis-masculine futurity". On her Twitter account, McGrath promotes extreme identity politics and political correctness, and comments on various topics, notably Brexit, LGBT issues, feminism and American politics.
Andrew Doyle, the creator of McGrath, revealed to The Daily Telegraph that she is named after Titania, the queen of the fairies from Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, as he believes that "all of this 'woke culture' is an utter fantasy world". He added: "The people who promote this hyper inclusive culture are fantasists [...] so I think it's quite appropriate that she is named after the queen of the fairies." Commentators at The Conversation and the Irish Independent have compared Doyle's work to the work of several satirists from the 18th century, such as Jonathan Swift's Isaac Bickerstaff, suggesting that McGrath, much like Bickerstaff, was created to criticise those with views the creator disagrees with in a manner which they feel he would be reluctant to state without anonymity.
History The account's creator, Andrew Doyle, is a comedian, and a columnist for British internet magazine Spiked. He is also the former co-writer of fictitious news reporter Jonathan Pie. Doyle has stated that he wished to mock contemporary "woke culture", as "the majority of people are desperate for this culture to be mocked"; he subsequently created an anonymous Twitter account for his fictional character, Titania McGrath, in April 2018. McGrath's Twitter account has been suspended for alleged hate speech four times, notably on 9 December 2018, only for it to gain 20,000 followers after it was reinstated a day later. As of December 2024, the spoof account had more than 740,000 followers. On 7 March 2019, McGrath published her first book, titled Woke: A Guide to Social Justice. A tweet she had posted promoting the book appeared in Private Eye's "Pseuds corner". The post read: "I have written the most important book of 2019. Do not buy it for my sake, but for the sake of humanity." Within a few days of its publication, Woke was among the 100 bestselling books on Amazon, and the number of followers on McGrath's Twitter account rose from 150,000 to 228,000. In March 2019, Doyle was contacted by Rosamund Urwin, a journalist at The Sunday Times, who asked whether he was the person behind McGrath's Twitter account, due to the inclusion of several sources in McGrath's book that he had quoted previously. Though he denied it, he later revealed himself as the man behind the account. Beforehand, Andrew Doyle had claimed that there was speculation that several people, including Chris Morris, Ricky Gervais, Ann Coulter, or even Urwin herself, were behind the account. McGrath's first children's book, My First Little Book of Intersectional Activism, was published by Little, Brown in September 2020.
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