An Interview With Simon Bibby, LiLT Founder, on the State of LiLT and Literature in EFL Simon Bibby Kobe Shoin Women’s University bibbysimon@gmail.com The Journal of Literature and Language Teaching (Gregg McNabb) virtually sat down with Simon Bibby for what turned out to be an enjoyable and wide-ranging conversation about this SIG and perspectives about the roles of literature in EFL. Q: Hello Simon, tell us a little bit about yourself I teach in Kobe, at a private women’s university there, where I am currently tenure track. I am from the UK originally, and came here 16 years ago, after having completed postgraduate teacher training in Bath. I did the typical eikaiwa thing for a few years, then moved onto part-time employment at university, then to a contract position, and now am tenure track. In my free time I play chess, but don’t get the time to play as much as I’d like! Q: How did LiLT come about? If I remember correctly, I think the Literature in Language Teaching (LiLT) SIG has just celebrated its fifth birthday! The idea came about rather by accident. I was teaching at a well-known private university in Kansai, in the “Policy Studies” department, where there were “Discussion Seminar” classes. I noted that when politics came up in discussion, students appeared to lack elementary political knowledge. I first sought to remedy that deficit through creating a current news topics course, then through an Animal Farm course. I designed this as a sort of “Politics 101, through a novel” course, and incorporated study of all sorts of things, including the political spectrum, a quick run-through of early 20 th century Russian history, rhetoric, propaganda, all through the reading of a classic literary text. I discussed this course earlier in these pages (Bibby, 2014b). Well, such was my situation, and my course. But, I wondered about others doing similar things, and I wanted to talk about the use of literature with other teachers. I assumed that there would be a national group for this, presumably within JALT. But no, there was not one, so I decided 26