Prof. Nina Witoszek is Research Director at the Centre for Development and the Environment at Oslo University and a Visiting Professor at the Woods Institute at Stanford University. Her academic publications include among others, Talking to the Dead: A Study of Irish Tradition (1998), The Postmodern Challenge: East and West Perspectives (1999) and Culture and Crisis (2002). Nina Witoszek is also a fiction writer - under the pen name Nina FitzPatrick - best known for her Fables of the Irish Intelligentsia (1991), The Loves of Faustyna (1995) and Daimons (2003). In 1991 she was the laureate of the Irish Times Award for Fiction, and in 2005 she won the prestigious Norwegian Free Speech Foundation Award for bringing Eastern European perspectives into the Scandinavian public debate.