'My critical and historical books and essays explore different figures in myth and fairy-tale and the art and literature they have inspired, from my early studies of the Virgin Mary and Joan of Arc to more recent work on the Arabian Nights. My fiction runs parallel to this, as I often draw on mythic or other imaginary predecessors to translate them into contemporary significance – to re-vision them.
Stories come from the past but speak to the present (if you taste the dragon’s blood and can hear what they say). I need to write stories as well as deconstruct and analyse them because I don’t want to damage the mysterious flight of imagination at the core of storytelling, the part that escapes what is called rational understanding. I hope, I believe that literature can be ‘strong enough to help’, to borrow Seamus Heaney’s wonderful comment about poetry.’ Read more here
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ABOUT MARINA WARNER
She was born in London in 1946, of an Italian mother and an English father who was a bookseller. After primary schools in Cairo and Brussels, she was educated in England at St Mary’s Convent, Ascot, and then read French and Italian as an undergraduate at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, of which she is now an Honorary Fellow.
Since 2004 she has been a professor in the Department of Literature, Film and Theatre Studies at the University of Essex, see Teaching here. She teaches an undergraduate course Transformation of Fairytale, She also teaches MA courses in Creative Writing; The Tale, and another one on psycho-geographical writing, Memory Maps.
She is visiting professor at NYU Abu Dhabi from January 2012.
She was elected a fellow of the British Academy in 2005, and was made a CBE for services to literature in 2008.
She is President of the British Comparative Literature Association (BCLA) for the period 2010-2013.
She is currently a trustee of The National Portrait Gallery and patron of Hosking Houses Trust, Reprieve
and The Society for Storytelling.
She gave the BBC’s Reith Lectures in 1994.
She has been awarded Honorary Doctorates by:
Oxford University, 2002
King’s College London, 2009
University of Leicester, 2006
University of Kent, 2005
Royal College of Art, 2004
Tavistock Institute (University of East London), 1999
University of St Andrew’s, 1998
University of North London, 1997
University of York, 1997
Sheffield Hallam University, 1995
University of Exeter, 1995
For the full Curriculum Vitae please see here.
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PUBLICATIONS
She has just completed a book Stranger Magic: Charmed States & the Arabian Nights published by Chatto & Windus, November 2011, for more news and information about this book please see here.
For a list of Novels, Stories, Libretti, and works for children please see Fiction here.
For a list of books of cultural history please see Non-Fiction here.
For Essays on Literature and Culture please see here.
For Essays on Art please see here.
She is currently working on a novel inspired by her father’s bookshop in Egypt in the Fifties entitled ‘Inventory of a Life Mislaid’.
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