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. Space Trumpet is installed in the atrium of the Unilever Building (Thames Embankment at Blackfriars Bridge). He will be exhibiting at the Basel Art Fair this summer. See here Two other new pieces, Palindrome and Lattice, are also on exhibition. See here, and 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.

News

You Silently II: Image, Object, Text curated by Dawn Ades and MW is opening at the Courtauld Library on May 12, with works by Nikos Stangos,  Ian Hamilton Finlay,  Graham Parker, Patricia Scanlan,  Sam Winston, and more.

Event: June 3 2008.

Conference: Memory Maps: Image, Place, and Story at CRASSH, Cambridge July 1-3 2008. See more here.

April 14: Presidential Lecture, Stanford:  The Voice of the Toy Writing Magic and Enchanted States. See more here.

25 April: MW gave the Jane Harrison Memorial Lecture, Cambridge 'Toys and Demons: The Secret Life of Things'

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

'Who Can Shave an Egg? Foreign tongues and primal sounds in Mallarmé and Beckett', talk at Beckett Centenary Festival Dublin (TLS, February 29 2008), and in Raritan Spring issue. Forthcoming from Michigan University Press.

'The Writing of Stones: Roger Caillois's Imaginary Logic', Cabinet magazine, Spring 2008.

 'The Compass of Story - Eastern Bearings in Western Literature', in What is the West? Stockholm, 2008.

'Ghosts and Daemons: The Revival of Myth and Magic'(Presidential Address, 2004),  Proceedings of the Virgil Society Vol XXVI, 2008

'Memories of the Martyrs’, for conference on The Passion of Saint Perpetua, Berlin. Forthcoming, Oxford University Press.

'Phantasmagoria: Visons spirites, metaphores,et media', Bil Bo K, 28, 2008.

'True Stories and Translated Selves' (Sebald Lecture, 2007), In Other Words, July 2008.

more on recent publications...

Phantasmagoria: Spirit Visions, Metaphors, and Media

Paperback due March 2008. 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, to be called Stranger Magic.

She is also working on a long term project of a novel set in Egypt in the Fifties.

13 May Hussey Lecture, Oxford

16 May Malcolm Bowie Memorial Conference: 'Mallarme in the Nursery; Beckett in Babel'

 More information and recent news here...

more forthcoming events & publications...