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

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'

13 May MW gave the Hussey Lecture,Oxford on Wise Men from the East: The Knowledge of Strangers, about Solomon and his magic carpet. 

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

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 lost life of things' (Sebald lecture) in Times Literary Supplement July 10 2008; different version in In Other Words... The Journal for Literary Translators, Summer 2008, no 31. 

The Wizard of Oz' Guardian Review 19.07.08.

'A Family Friend', short story first broadcast in Alan Howard Reads on Radio 4 will be posted with introduction by International Literary Quarterly, No. 4, http://www.interlitq.org/

Melusine', short story in Marie- Claude de Brunhoff, Theatres Immobiles (Paris:Seuil,  2008)

 '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 2008. 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.

‘Phew! Whaam! Aaargh! Boo!: Sense, Sensation, and Picturing Sound’ in The Soundtrack, Vol 1, 2008.  

more on recent publications...

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, to be called Stranger Magic.

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

 More information and recent news here...

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

more forthcoming events & publications...