Marina Warner

Marina Warner is a prize-winning writer of fiction, criticism and history; her works include novels and short stories as well as studies of female myths and symbols.

She was born in London in 1946, of an Italian mother and an English father who was a bookseller. Marina Warner was educated in Cairo, Brussels, Berkshire, England, and Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford.

Her son Conrad Shawcross is an artist. See here.    Space Trumpet is installed in the atrium of the Unilever Building (Thames Embankment at Blackfriars Bridge). See here .  Conrad is currently a visiting International Fellow at Location One in New York.  He has just been awarded the Illy Prize. See here

Marina Warner is Professor in the Department of Literature, Film and Theatre Studies, University of Essex where she teaches courses on Fairy-Tales and other forms of narrative.
see: here, here and here.

Memory Maps, a collaboration between the Victoria and Albert Museum and the University of Essex, was launched in 2006. The project and associated creative writing course can be viewed here.

Patron, Hosking Houses Trust, 2006-  See here

News

12 June 6.30 National Gallery: Writers' Talks. 'On Dido Receiving Aeneas' by Solimena. 

21 June London Review of Books Festival, British Museum, 4.00 pm. With Robert Chandler: The Voices of the Masters (and the Mistresses), on translation. 

22 June Amsterdam, Holland Festival, 8.00pm: On New Beauty Old Brand New Lecture Series 8.00 See Here 

25 June The Massacre by Elizabeth Inchbald, Theatre Royal, Bury St Edmunds, 7.30 pm Discussion with Timberlake Wertenbaker, Bridget Orr and Colin Blumenau.  See here 

4 July From the Beast to the Blonde: A Fairy Tale Masked Ball, Last  Tuesday Society, See here 

5 July Harrison Birtwhistle and David Harsent: The Corridor, discussion chaired by MW, Purcell Room, South Bank, London, 7.30 pm see here 

With Joanna MacGregor and Dan Fern, a multimedia piece inspired by The Difference in the Dose, a story inspired by  the fairytale of Rapunzel  for the Bath Music Festival, June 4-7 2009, see here  

Appointed a Trustee of the National Portrait Gallery.

  Distinguished Visiting Professor in the Humanities,  Queen Mary, University of London, for 2009- 2012. 

Visiting Professor in the Dept of Animation at the Royal College of Art for two years, working with Joan Ashworth and Deborah Levy and their students.

Stanford Presidential Lecture, 2008 See Here

Click here for more photos of Marina Warner

click here for hi-resolution photo (PDF) of Marina Warner (please credit John Batten)

Recent and forthcoming publications

  'The Difference in the Dose', Bath Music Festival , published Royal College of Art, London, 2009, with illustrations by Zoe Taylor

'Forget My Fate', short story in Midsummer Nights, ed. Jeanette Winterson, Quercus, 2009

'Rat and Bear: The Animal Fables of Fischli/Weiss' in Peter Fischli and David Weiss, Are Animals People? Exhibitioncatalogue, Reina Sofia, Madrid, 2009

 'The Metamorphoses of Narcissus', in The Body and the Arts, ed. Corinne Saunders, Palgrave, 2009.

'Ventriloquism', review essay of Edward FitzGerald, The Rubaiyyat of Omar Khayyam, ed. Daniel Karlin, in London Review of Books, April 9  2009.

'Travelling Text' review essay about the Arabian Nights, in London Review of Books, December 18 2008 

'Afterword:Mirror-Readings', in  The Poetics of Recognition, ed. Marilyn Lawrence and Philip Kennedy,  Peter Lang, 2009.

 'Who Can Shave an Egg? Foreign tongues and primal sounds in Mallarmé and Beckett', Forthcoming from Michigan University Press.

Out of an old toy chest', in Journal of Aesthetic Education, Summer 2009 (43.2)

'Cancellanda', reprinted with commentary in Myth and Violence in the Contemporary Female Text: New Cassandras, ed. Sanja Bahun, forthcoming, Ashgate, 2010

Phantasmagoria: Spirit Visions, Metaphors, and Media

Paperback now published by Oxford University Press.

Phantasmagoria explores ideas of spirit and soul since the Enlightenment; it traces metaphors that have traditionally conveyed the presence of immaterial forces, and reveals how such pagan and Christian imagery about ethereal beings are embedded in a logic of the imagination, clothing spirits in the languages of air, clouds, light and shadow, glass, and ether itself.

Michael Dirda in The Washington Post wrote:'In these dense pages, she ranges from Platonic appearances to Philip K. Dick's replicants, from the camera obscura to the Internet; she cites the work of contemporary writers, artists and filmmakers on one page and the speculations of Renaissance polymaths and Victorian scientists on another. '

Read more...

'...a bold, imaginative and provocative study, with a range few others would dare.' - Carolyne Larrington, Times Literary Supplement

more reviews & info...

Current

MW is writing a book about magic and magicians. Working title: Stranger Magic.

She is also working on a novel inspired by her father's bookshop in Egypt in the Fifties. Working title: Inventory  of a Life Mislaid

 More information and recent news here...

'Memories of the Martyrs’, for conference on The Passion of Saint Perpetua, Berlin. Forthcoming, edited by Jan Bremmer and Marco Formisano, Oxford University Press.

'Wild Ecstasy' on the Satyr of Mazara del Vallo, and other Dionysiac themes, in Arcadia, an artists' book, with Felicity Powell,

Ansel Krut et al.

more forthcoming events & publications...