Katharine Penelope Burdekin (née Cade; 23 July 1896 – 10 August 1963) was a British novelist who wrote speculative fiction concerned with social and spiritual matters.

Daphne Patai unraveled "Murray Constantine's" true identity while doing research on utopian and dystopian fiction in the mid-1980s.

She allegedly adopted the pseudonym to protect her family from the risk of repercussions and attacks for her novel's political nature and strong criticism of fascism.

Reflecting Burdekin's analysis of the masculine element in fascist ideology, Swastika Night depicts a world divided between two militaristic powers: the Nazis and Japan.

Burdekin anticipated the Holocaust and understood the dangers presented by a militarised Japan while most people in her society were still supporting a policy of appeasement.

Her unpublished manuscript, The End of This Day's Business, was published by The Feminist Press in New York in 1989;[11] it is a counterpart to Swastika Night and envisions a distant future in which women rule and men are deprived of all power.

[1] This vision was also subjected to Burdekin's critique; she had little patience with what she called "reversals of privilege" and aspired to a future in which domination itself would finally be overcome.

With the growing interest in women's utopian fiction in the last few decades, her work has been the object of considerable scholarly attention.

[12] Patai discovered that Burdekin wrote Swastika Night and other feminist speculative fiction in the 1930s that was published under the pseudonym of Murray Constantine.