Fantasy Literature

Breaking the rules of fantasy: Alan Garner’s The Owl Service at 50

* This is the original first draft of my Times Literary Supplement article “Alan Garner’s The Owl Service at fifty”. The published version (which appeared on 21 August 2017 to celebrate 50 years from the publication of this novel) is…

By Dimitra Fimi | 17th October 2021 | Alan Garner, Children's Fantasy, Children's Literature, Fantasy Literature, Myth and Folklore, Welsh myth an folklore | No Comments |

Surprises and Discoveries in the Drawings by Tolkien exhibition catalogue (1976)

I have been going through a number of small pamphlets and booklets in my Tolkien collection recently, and have been posting about them on Twitter: see here for a thread on the UK and USA Hobbit 50th Anniversart commemorative booklets…

By Dimitra Fimi | 2nd June 2021 | Children's Literature, Fantasy Literature, The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien | No Comments |

Faërie: A Sonnet

It’s been a heady few weeks in my academic world. We recently launched the Centre for Fantasy and the Fantastic at the University of Glasgow (which I co-direct), I welcomed a new cohort of Fantasy MLitt students and started teaching…

By Dimitra Fimi | 1st October 2020 | Fantasy Literature | No Comments |

Lloyd Alexander’s “eat and read” regime: food and fiction!

I have briefly mentioned before Lloyd Alexander’s “eat and read” programme, but in these times of coronavirus, much more home-bound due to lock-down and the self-isolation advice, I have found myself reading more during the day, and cooking more, and…

By Dimitra Fimi | 27th May 2020 | Children's Literature, Fantasy Literature, Lloyd Alexander | No Comments |

Top 3 Fantasy Authors excluding Tolkien? Data from a Twitter snap poll.

A couple of weeks ago, I posted a tweet which ended up developing into a snap poll with over 450 responses. The question? Here it goes: Please help me with a quick experiment to inform a discussion with our #Fantasy…

By Dimitra Fimi | 18th May 2020 | Children's Fantasy, Fantasy Literature, Tolkien, Ursula K. Le Guin | No Comments |

Reading J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit with my 6-and-a-half-year-old son: a journal

One of the highlights of 2019 was reading J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit aloud to my 6-and-a-half-year-old son at bedtime. We started towards the end of August 2019, and finished it in just over a month. I tweeted the entire experience…

By Dimitra Fimi | 3rd January 2020 | Children's Fantasy, Children's Literature, Fantasy Literature, The Hobbit, Tolkien | No Comments |

Celtic Myth in Contemporary Children’s Fantasy wins Mythopoeic Award!

I was absolutely thrilled to find out a couple of months ago that my recent monograph, Celtic Myth in Contemporary Children’s Fantasy, had won the Mythopoeic Scholarship Award in Myth and Fantasy Studies! This is my second Mythopoeic Award: my…

By Dimitra Fimi | 18th November 2019 | Alan Garner, Awards, Books, Celtic Myth, Children's Fantasy, Children's Literature, Fantasy Literature, Folklore, Henry Neff, Irish myth and folklore, Lloyd Alexander, Myth and Folklore, Welsh myth an folklore | No Comments |

Samhain or Halloween? The “ancient Celtic year” in Contemporary Children’s Fantasy

* This essay was originally published in Gramarye, the journal of the Chichester Centre for Fairy Tales, Fantasy and Speculative Fiction, in Issue 11 (Summer 2017), pp. 51-63. In the medieval Irish tale of Tochmarc Emire (“The Wooing of Emer”),…

By Dimitra Fimi | 28th October 2019 | Books, Children's Fantasy, Children's Literature, Fantasy Literature | No Comments |

Tiny Alice and Miniature Books Exhibition – July-September 2019

This summer, a very exciting project I have been working on for a while was launched, and I curated my first exhibition to accompany and complement it. The launch itself was an overwhelming moment, with a lot of media attention…

By Dimitra Fimi | 5th September 2019 | Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Children's Fantasy, Fantasy Literature, Media | No Comments |

A time-traveling cat fantasy: Lloyd Alexander’s Time Cat

I’ve been threatening with a blog post about a time-traveling cat for a while now, so here it is! I’m giving you Lloyd Alexander’s children’s fantasy Time Cat: The Remarkable Journeys of Jason and Gareth, what we’d probably call a…

By Dimitra Fimi | 12th May 2019 | Children's Fantasy, Children's Literature, Fantasy Literature, Lloyd Alexander, Welsh myth an folklore | No Comments |

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