Dimitra Fimi

Dimitra Fimi (born 2 June 1978) is a Greek academic and writer and since 2023 Professor of Fantasy and Children's Literature at the University of Glasgow. Her research includes that of the writings of J. R. R. Tolkien and children's fantasy literature.

Early life
From the island of Salamis in the Greek region of Attica, 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 (2002) and PhD in English Literature (2005) at Cardiff University.

Career
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. In September 2018 she was appointed 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. In September 2020 she was appointed Co-Director of the Centre for Fantasy and the Fantastic at the University of Glasgow, to lecture on fantasy and children's literature. She is a Visiting Lecturer in English Literature at Signum University, an online learning facility.

Tolkien scholar
Her doctoral thesis on the vexed issue of Tolkien and race was published as the monograph Tolkien, Race and Cultural History (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). It won the Mythopoeic Scholarship Award for Inklings Studies in 2010, and was shortlisted for the Katharine Briggs Folklore Award. With Andrew Higgins she is co-editor of A Secret Vice: Tolkien on Invented Languages (HarperCollins, 2016) which won the Tolkien Society Award for Best Book in 2017.

Awards and distinctions
Fimi's other works include Celtic Myth in Contemporary Children's Fantasy (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) which was the runner-up for the Katharine Briggs Folklore Award. She was one of the judges of the Wales Book of the Year Award 2017 and was selected for the Welsh Crucible in 2017. She has contributed chapters in A Companion to J. R. R. Tolkien (Blackwell, 2014), and Revisiting Imaginary Worlds: A Subcreation Studies Anthology (Routledge, 2016). She is a member of The Tolkien Society and has written articles for magazines and websites including the Times Literary Supplement and The Conversation; she appears regularly on BBC Radio Wales.

Books

 * Written


 * Celtic Myth in Contemporary Children's Fantasy (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017)
 * Celtic Myth in Contemporary Children's Fantasy (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017)


 * Edited


 * (with Andrew Higgins) A Secret Vice: Tolkien on Invented Languages (HarperCollins, 2016)