From East to West

Martin Simonson wrote his Ph.D thesis on the interaction of narrative genres in The Lord of the Rings, and he has published extensively on Tolkien and fantasy literature. He has edited a number of academic books and anthologies on fantasy and fairy tales, and on Western American literature. He has translated about thirty novels, plays and essays into Spanish, among others a number of titles by J.R.R. Tolkien. He currently teaches modern English literature on the BA program of English Studies at the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU) in Vitoria (Spain), as well as fantasy, science fiction and Gothic novel on the M.A. program of comparative literature at the same university.Jon Alkorta Martiartu received his Ph.D from the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU) in the year 2019, with a comparative study of the problems raised by the idea of progress in canonical British fantasy and the Earthsea universe of Ursula K. Le Guin. He has also helped organize and participated as a speaker in several international conferences in Spain and Portugal.

• 1. The Discourse of Nature in British Imaginative Literature: From the Middle Ages to the Early Twentieth Century2. Edwardian Reconfigurations of the Poetics of Nature and Fantasy3. J.R.R. Tolkien’s Depiction of Nature4. Nature, Fantasy and the American West in Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea