Dimitra Fimi
Dr. Dimitra Fimi is an academic and writer and since 2018 the Lecturer in Fantasy and Children's Literature at the University of Glasgow. She is an authority on the writings of J. R. R. Tolkien and children's fantasy literature.
From Salamis Island in the Attica Region of Greece, the daughter of teachers Pavlos Fimis and Theodora Papaliveriou-Fimi, she attended the 1st General Lyceum of Salamis from where she graduated in 1996. Fimi gained her BA degree at the University of Athens in 2000 before completing her MA in Early Celtic Studies and PhD in English Literature at Cardiff University. From 2009 to 2018 she was among the staff of Cardiff Metropolitan University as a lecturer in English after having previously lectured for Cardiff University and the Open University. Since September 2018 she has been the Lecturer in Fantasy and Children's Literature at the University of Glasgow, the first time the term “fantasy” has ever been used in an academic post title in the UK.
Her doctoral thesis was published as the monograph Tolkien, Race and Cultural History and won the Mythopoeic Scholarship Award for Inklings Studies in 2010 in addition to being shortlisted for the Katharine Briggs Folklore Award. With Andrew Higgins she is co-editor of A Secret Vice: Tolkien on Invented Languages which won the Tolkien Society Award for Best Book in 2017. Her other works include Celtic Myth in Contemporary Children’s Fantasy which was the runner-up for Katharine Briggs Folklore Award. Fimi lectures on fantasy, children's literature, and medievalism. She was one of the judges of the Wales Book of the Year Award 2017 and was also selected for the Welsh Crucible in 2017. Fimi is a Visiting Lecturer in English Literature at Signum University, an online learning facility.
Fimi's other recent work includes chapters in A Companion to J.R.R. Tolkien, and Revisiting Imaginary Worlds: A Subcreation Studies Anthology. She has contributed articles for the Times Literary Supplement and The Conversation among many others and appears regularly on BBC Radio Wales.
