Elena Semino is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Linguistics and English Language at Lancaster University. She is interested in stylistics, corpus linguistics and metaphor studies. Her previous research has been concerned with literary text worlds, fictional minds, and the presentation of characters’ speech and thought in fictional and non-fictional narratives. Her work on metaphor has involved a range of texts and genres (e.g. novels, news reports, scientific texts), as well as a range of methods, both qualitative and quantitative. As a member of the Pragglejaz Group of metaphor researchers, Elena has contributed to the development of an explicit method for the identification of metaphorical expressions in discourse. She has published approximately twenty book chapters and over twenty-five articles in journals including: Style, Narrative, Journal of Pragmatics, Text and Talk, Language and Literature, Discourse and Society, and Metaphor and Symbol. She is author of Language and World Creation in Poems and Other Texts (Longman 1997) and Metaphor in Discourse (Cambridge University Press, 2008), co-author of Corpus Stylistics: Speech, Writing and Thought Presentation in a Corpus of English Writing (Routledge, 2004, with Mick Short) and co-editor of Cognitive Stylistics: Language and Cognition in Text Analysis (John Benjamins, 2002, with Jonathan Culpeper).