Kelly Link, Marina Warner and Terri Windling with Amal El-Mohtar

This is an online only event streamed on the British Library platform. Bookers will be sent a viewing link shortly before the event and will be able to watch at any time for 48 hours after the start time.

The British writer Angela Carter created some of the greatest reworkings of traditional tales, transforming them with subversive ribaldry, extraordinary imagery, eroticism and sly humour in The Bloody Chamber (1979) and other masterpieces.

Our panel explores the nature of the fairy tale tradition and its ongoing power.

Amal El-Mohtar is an award-winning writer of fiction, poetry, and criticism, who has been the New York Times's science fiction and fantasy columnist since February 2018. Her stories and poems have appeared in magazines including Tor.com, Fireside Fiction, Lightspeed, Uncanny, Strange Horizons, Apex, Stone Telling, and Mythic Delirium; anthologies including The Djinn Falls in Love and Other Stories (2017), The Starlit Wood: New Fairy Tales (2016), Kaleidoscope: Diverse YA Science Fiction and Fantasy Stories (2014), and The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities (2011); and in her own collection, The Honey Month (2010). She is co-author, with Max Gladstone, of the multiple award-winning This is How You Lose the Time War. Her articles and reviews have appeared in the New York Times, NPR Books and on Tor.com.

Kelly Link’s most recent collection of short stories, White Cat, Black Dog have been described as ingeniously reinvented fairy tales. Her collection Get in Trouble (2014) was a Pulitzer Prize finalist, a national bestseller, and named one of the Best Books of the Year by the Washington Post, NPR, the Chicago Tribune, Time, Slate, and the San Francisco Chronicle. She is the author of three other collections: Stranger Things Happen, Magic for Beginners, and Pretty Monsters . Her short stories have been published in A Public Space, One Story, Tin House, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, The Best American Short Stories, and Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards. She currently lives with her husband and daughter in Northampton, Massachusetts. She was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship (aka Genius Grant) in 2018. Her debut novel, The Book of Love, will be published by Head of Zeus on 8th February 2024.

Marina Warner is an award-winning novelist, short story writer, historian and mythographer, who works across genres and cultures exploring myths, stories and fairytales. Her books include Fly Away Home (2015); Once Upon A Time: A Short History of Fairy Tale (2014), Stranger Magic: Charmed States & The Arabian Nights (2013), Forms of Enchantment: Writings on Art and Artists (2018) and Inventory of a Life Mislaid: An Unreliable Memoir (2021).She is Professor of English and Creative Writing at Birkbeck College, London, a Distinguished Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, a Fellow of the British Academy and former President of the Royal Society of Literature.

Terri Windling is a writer, editor, and folklorist specialising in fantasy and mythic arts. She has published over forty books, receiving ten World Fantasy Awards (including the Life Achievement Award in 2022), the Mythopoeic Award, the Bram Stoker Award, and the SFWA Solstice Award. She has edited many of the major fantasy writers in the field; writes fiction for adults and children, nonfiction on fairy tales and faery lore, and a long-running blog on myth, nature, and creativity: Myth & Moor.

This event accompanies the British Library exhibition Fantasy: Realms of Imagination 27 October – 25 February supported by Wayland Games and Unwin Charitable Trust: 



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