* 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…
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…
Back in 2016, I was very privileged to watch the “lost recordings” from J.R.R. Tolkien’s 1968 interview for the BBC. Those were previously unbroadcast offcuts from a filmed interview with Tolkien by John Izzard, a small part of which had…
The last few years have seen the publication of two of Tolkien’s works that scholars and serious fans have known about for a very long time: Tolkien’s unfinished alliterative poem The Fall of Arthur[i] and Tolkien’s prose translation of Beowulf…
Yesterday I gave a brief interview on J.R.R. Tolkien for the Turkish TV channel TRT World. It’s now available on YouTube and can be accessed here: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=90OMuDIbliA
I have just found out that my latest monograph, Celtic Myth in Contemporary Children’s Fantasy (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), has been shortlisted for the Mythopoeic Scholarship Award in Myth and Fantasy Studies! The Mythopoeic Awards are divided into four categories, two for fiction, and…
The next few months are going to be a bit hectic! If you are attending any of the conferences or events below, don’t hesitate to come and say hello! 26-27 April – Keynote for GIFCon (Glasgow International Fantasy Conversations) 2018: ‘In the…
I was saddened this morning to hear about the death of Ursula K. Le Guin, one of the giants of fantasy literature, and an author I have written about and taught for many years. I was asked to write a…
I had a new (festive) article published yesterday on the The Conversation, titled: “J.R.R. Tolkien’s Christmas letters to his children bring echoes of Middle-earth to the North Pole”. In this article I discuss the letters from Father Christmas Tolkien sent…
One of the books I’ve worked with very closely during the last few years is Alan Garner’s The Owl Service. Garner’s creative re-use of the tale of Lleu, Blodeuwedd, and Gronw from the Welsh Mabinogion made it a prime candidate…