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School of English and Drama

Karina Lickorish Quinn

Karina

Spectrality, Deconstruction and Andean Cosmovision in the Contemporary Peruvian Novel

Email: k.lickorishquinn@qmul.ac.uk
Website: http://www.karinalickorishquinn.co.uk

Profile

I am Peruvian-British, born in Turkey, and I was raised bilingual in the Midlands, Lima and New York City. I obtained my first degree in law from the University of Oxford and worked briefly as a family law barrister before making a career change into secondary English teaching. I hold a PGCE with Distinction and an MA from the UCL Institute of Education and have taught in various state secondary schools in London.

My PhD thesis consists of two parts, a creative practice-based element and a critical element. The creative project is a magic realist novel about the construction of the Peruvian nation since the end of the Tawantinsuyu to the present day. The novel explores what it means to be Peruvian, interrogating and problematising the narrative of Peruanidad, asking who has been included and who excluded from that narrative.

The critical portion of my thesis examines spectrality in the contemporary Peruvian novel. I am interested in how the spectre is used as a means of privileging an Andean-centric approach to remembering the Internal Armed Conflict of the 1980s and ‘90s, processing individual and national trauma and approaching reconciliation. I have presented my research at various international conferences in the UK, the USA, Paris and Lima, Perú.

My prose fiction and translation has been published by Asymptote and The Offing. My short story ‘Oögenesis’ was short-listed for The White Review Short Story Prize and highly commended for The Manchester Fiction Prize. I have work forthcoming in Question Journal and in an anthology of British-Latinx writers (both due for publication in 2019).

I am committed to public engagement. In 2018 I was commissioned by the British Library to write and perform stories in response to the Object Journeys exhibition on family and heritage. I have also delivered multilingual creative writing workshops for children and families. In June 2019, I will be running a workshop (funded by OWRI and the King’s Language Acts and Worldmaking Project) for secondary school teachers on how to bring multilingualism into the secondary English classroom.

My current research interests are transnationalism, Latinidad and British-Latinidad, contemporary world literature with a focus on the contemporary Latin American novel, gender, spectrality, the female grotesque, the carnivalesque, magic realism, literature in translation and multilingual literature.

Follow me on Twitter @KLickorishQuinn

Teaching

  • ESH4100 Creative Writing I
  • ESH5101 Creative Writing: The Short Story

Research

Supervision

Professor Patrick Flanery and Dr Rachael Gilmour
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