Karina Lickorish Quinn

Personal Profile

I joined RHUL in June 2022 as a Lecturer in Creative Writing. I have previously taught at the University of Leeds, Queen Mary University of London (where I was runner up for the Teacher of the Year Award), and the University of Reading. 

I obtained my BA in Jurisprudence from the University of Oxford and qualified as a barrister in 2010 before deciding I would much rather teach literature. I obtained my PGCE in English from Canterbury Christ Church Unviersity and my MA from the UCL Institute of Education. I obtained my PhD from Queen Mary University of London.

My short prose fiction and life writing have been published in diverse journals. My debut novel The Dust Never Settles was published by Oneworld on 7 October 2021. I have received Arts Council funding to work on my second novel about the environmental and human impacts of building projects on the Amazon river.

Pronouns: she/her.

Research Interests

Memory and Counter-Memory

The conception of writing as a way of remembering is central to my creative and critical practice. My novel The Dust Never Settles (which is also the creative portion of my PhD thesis) explores the countermemories of the Peruvian nation and the impact those absent memories have on the present. In this novel I ask, how does the past impact the individual, the community, and the nation? Much of the novel is based on archival research I conducted in Peru, trying to excavate untold stories that have been excluded from dominant historical narratives.

In my critical research, I have a special interest in post-conflict literature and how writers engage in remembering and reframing internal armed conflicts, particularly during or after formal processes of transitional justice.

I am currently examining contemporary Peruvian novels about the internal armed conflict of the 1980s and 1990s. In particular, I am interested in how writers dialogue with and problematise the findings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and remember the conflict from an Andeancentric perspective, crafting novels that are founded in Andean philosophy and employ Andean aesthetics.

My PhD thesis explored spectrality in the novels of Eduardo González Viaña, Óscar Colchado Lucio, and Karina Pacheco Medrano and how the spectral reveals an Andean way of remembering the conflict and interpreting transitional justice.

Anti-'Realism'

Much of my creative work explores anti-‘realist’ styles of writing, including surrealism, magic realism and the carnivalesque.

In 2016 my surrealist short story ‘Oogenesis’ was short-listed for The White Review short story prize. My novel Mancharisqa draws significantly on the legacy of the Latin American literature including the ‘boom’ writers of magic realism and on indigenous Latin American forms of story-telling.

I am interested in challenging what is considered ‘realist’ writing because underpinning this label lie assumptions about whose epistemologies and knowledges are considered ‘real’ and whose are considered Other.

Translanguaging and Multilingual Writing

As a bilingual writer myself, I am interested in multilingual literature and ways to subvert the monolingual paradigm that dominates publishing and privileges the colonial languages of the Global North. I am interested in how translingual writing could be taught more in schools as a means of recognising, respecting and valorising the linguistic and cultural diversity of modern Britain.