Festival of the Imagination – Souvenir book – Janeen Webb

Pages 53 to 56 of the Festival of the Imagination 1996 Souvenir book are dedicated to the appreciation of Janeen Webb. This post features the first part, which is a potted biography taking up just under a page. The second part, being “An Appreciation” by Pamela Sargent, takes slightly over a page, and will feature in a later blog post. Pages 55 and 56 are a biobliography which will not be transcribed.

Sections of this article are very similar to information in various newsletters, but the whole article has been transcribed anyway.


Janeen Webb

Dr. Janeen Webb is a senior lecturer (professor) of literature at the Australian Catholic University in Melbourne, Australia. She is a specialist in comparative literature, children’s literature, and speculative fiction. One of Australia’s leading sf critics, her work is also widely published in the USA, England, Germany, and Austria. She has written over seventy-five articles, essays, and reviews for such journals and magazines as Omni; Foundation; The New York Review of Science Fiction; Meanjin (the Australian Critical Quarterly); The Age (Australia’s largest and most influential newspaper); Selected Essays from the Fifteenth International Conference On The Fantastic In The Arts; Magpies: Talking About Books For Children; Papers: Explorations Into Children’s Literature; Metascience: International Review Journal For The History, Philosophy And Social Studies of Science; Australian Science Fiction Review; and The Journal Of Myth, Fantasy, and Romanticism.

Her books include Trends in the Modern Novel (Institute of Early Childhood Development), Modern Australian Drama (with G. McKay)(Institute of Early Childhood Development), and Storylines (with M. Tyrrell) (Oxford University Press). Dr Webb is currently working on critical bibliographies of William Gibson, Angela Carter and Thomas Keneally for the Borgo Press Modern Authors series.

Dr. Webb was co-editor of the Australian Science Fiction Review from 1987 to 1991. This bi-monthly journal was the premier science fiction forum in Australia and had a world-wide influence on science fiction, especially in the USA.

She is a consultant and contributor to the Hugo award winning Encyclopaedia of Science Fiction, edited by John Clute and Peter Nicholls. Her most recent article entitled “Wings”–a critical appraisal of the Australian aviation pioneer Lawrence Hargrave–appeared in the January 1995 issue of Omni Magazine. In July, 1994, she convened the 10th Annual International Conference Of The Australian Mythopoeic Literature Society.

Dr. Web is listed in the Who’s Who Of Academics In Australia, The World Who’s Who of Women (13th edition) and the International Who’s Who of Intellectuals (11th edition).

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