A Lancaster University professor, whose pioneering work is inspiring non-readers to take up the classics, has been invited to take part in the first ever festival of ideas fusing art and science in Hong Kong.

Sally Bushell, Professor of Romantic and Victorian Literature at Lancaster, will address the British Council’s Festival of Ideas, entitled SPARK: The Science and Art of Creativity Festival.

The event from January 18 to 20 is designed to celebrate creativity across the arts, sciences and education and offer a platform for cultural exchange between the UK and Hong Kong.

Open to all, particularly those under 30, the three-day festival at the Tai Kwun Centre for Heritage and Arts is intended to foster partnerships between institutions from Britain and Hong Kong.

One aspect of the festival will be to examine ways of integrating education and technology.

Professor Bushell’s ‘Litcraft’ project, which combines literature and the Minecraft gaming platform, is likely to attract a great deal of attention at the festival through three interactive workshops.

Using Minecraft to build accurate scale models of maps from classic works of literature, such as Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island, the innovative project, under development for more than a year, has been trialled and piloted in Britain, and is in the process of being made more widely available.

It encourages children, aged 10 to 12, to read by combining texts, currently centred on an imaginative island theme, with the digital world. The structured framework entices the young readers to dip in and out of the book to enable them to complete a series of digital tasks.

It is not a substitute for reading books but works alongside reading and, therefore, is felt to have real potential for reluctant readers by positively connecting reading, gaming and playing.

The invitation to attend the festival came from the British Library, key partners in Professor Bushell’s wider £914,000 Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded literary mapping project

“Working with the British Library has enabled us to reach a much wider audience. We created ‘Litcraft in Libraries’ following on from our ‘Litcraft in Schools’ project and this has led to us working with five Libraries pan-UK.

“I am really looking forward to Hong Kong where we see plenty of potential and our hopes are for a trial or partnership there that will allow Litcraft to develop internationally.”