Anna Smith teaches children’s and adolescent fiction at the University of Canterbury. Since 1997, she has been involved in building a pathway from 100 to post-graduate level in children’s literature. After completing a book on the psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva and teaching courses in literary theory, she began to focus on a more lively and engaged approach to texts for young people in particular.

In 2006, she helped introduce a course on cultures of the supernatural, and her latest, in 2007, looks at children’s classics and their representation on film. Not surprisingly, this is proving to be a popular paper which examines how the process of translation from one medium to another, while almost always captivating, can also be a mixed blessing.