______________________________________________________________________________________ OTHER ACTIVITIES>BROADCASTS & LIBRETTI
Marina Warner has participated in many film, television and radio broadcasts in the UK, Europe, America, Asia, Australia and the United States. Below are a selection of clips available to stream.
For a list of all current events please see the Curent Diary page here.
25th February 2012, 8pm
MW interviewed for 'The Politics of Art'.This "Archive on 4" uses the fortieth anniversary of John Berger's ground-breaking BBC-2 series on art and society - called "Ways of Seeing" - and Tim Marlow's extensive knowledge and popular appeal to do three things. Full details here.
17th February 2012, 10pm BBC Radio 3
Marina Warner and Christopher Frayling join Ian McMillan to mark the twentieth anniversary of Angela Carter's death with a celebration of her writing for The Verb on BBC Radio 3. Full details here.
16th February 2012, 11:30am
MW interviewed for 'Writing in Three Dimensions: Angela Carter's Love Affair with Radio' broadcast on BBC Radio 4. Full details here.
3rd January 2012, 12pm
Interview on RTE Radio Ireland: Arts Tonight.
Marina Warner on the Arabian Nights stories. The programme can be heard here.
26th December 2011, 12pm
'The Virgin Mary in history and art'.
Miri Rubin, Catherine Marshall, Colm Toibin and Marina Warner on imaginings of Mary. Broadcast on on Arts Tonight with Vincent Woods, RTÉ Radio One, Ireland. The programme can be heard here.
3rd November 2011, 10am
MW is interviewed on BBC Radio 4 Woman's Hour about her recent book ‘Stranger Magic, Charmed States and the Arabian Nights'. The stories in the Arabian Nights feature a world of magic, genies, flying carpets, hidden treasures, evil spirits and iconic heroes.
Translated into French and English in the early days of the Enlightenment, this Arabic collection of folk and fairy tales became a hugely popular especially tales such as Ali Baba and the forty thieves’ and ‘Aladdin’. At the heart is the heroic figure of Shahrazad, the teller of the tales. However, many of the women in the Arabian Nights are often seen as conniving, adulterous and even cruel.
The programme can be heard here.
30th October 2011, 8am
MW is interviewed on BBC Radio 4 Today Programme about the protests outside St Pauls Cathedral. More information here.
24 September 2010
'The Magic Carpet Flight Manual', radio documentary for BBC World Service.
Cathy FitzGerald explores the past, present, and very real future of the magic carpet and wonders what our desire to defy gravity tells us about ourselves. Cultural historian Marina Warner explains the origins of the symbol in the Arabian Nights, and wonders whether we had to invent flying carpets in order to learn how to fly. We dream of flying and often long to fly unaided - is that part of it? Details and programme can be heard here.
3rd August 2011 at 4pm ‘BBC Radio 4
‘Thinking Allowed’ Laurie Taylor discusses the mummy’s curse and other Oriental myths with Marina Warner and Roger Luckhurst. The programme is repeated on Monday 8th August at 00:15.
8th July 2011, 10:45pm,
MW contributed ‘Wild Ecstasy’ an essay for BBC Radio 3 for ‘Wild Nature’ the last in the series of five on Dark Arcadias, the history of the idea.
MW contributed to the BBC Radio 4 World At One Election special edition presented by Martha Kearney's along with former CBI Director General and government business advisor Digby Jones.The programme was broadcast on April, 12th, 2010.
19th March 2011, 23:30 BBC Radio 4
MW interviewed for 'The Company of Poets' on BBC Radio 4. Susannah Clapp goes to the British Library to look at the poems in Angela Carter's journals, and her lists of the things that she was reading at the time she wrote them. More information here.
18th October, 2007
MW contributed to a discussion on the myths, tales and legends of The Arabian Nights for ‘In Our Time’ on BBC Radio 4 broadcast on October, 18th, 2007, with Robert Irwin and Gerard van Gelder, Laudian Professor of Arabic at the University of Oxford. The programme details are here.
27th March 2007 BBC Radio 4
MW contributed to a A Good Read with Sue MacGregor and Tim Marlow on Radio 4 broadcast on 27th and 30th March 2007.
MW delivered the BBC Reith Lectures between January and March 1994.
'Managing Monsters' examined how myths express and shape our attitudes. All details, podcasts and transcripts can be found here. 1st Lecture: Monstrous Mothers' examines the role of the ‘she-monster’ in myth; from Medea to Jurassic Park. Click here to listen and Download.
2nd Lecture: 'Boys will be Boys' examines the threads linking ancient myths and modern machismo and argues that ideas about masculinity are not naturally inculcated. Click here to listen and download.
3rd Lecture: 'Little Angels, Little Devils: Keeping Children Innocent' examines the various depictions of children in myths and stories and looks at the burden of dreams that children bear from Peter Pan to Poltergeist.
Click here to listen and download.
4th Lecture: 'Beautiful Beasts: The Call of The Wild' examines the changing value of the animal, from King Kong to the teddy bear. Click here to listen and download.
5th Lecture: 'Cannibal Tales: The Hunger for Conquest' explores myths of cannibalism from The Tempest to Hannibal Lecter, and considers how their message of ‘either we eat them or they eat us’, helped to justify the presence of the invader. Click here to listen and download.
6th Lecture: 'Home: Our Famous Island Race' explores the myths of national identity and asks: what is home ground? Click here to listen and download.
MW contributed to the BBC Four documentary ‘Secrets of the Arabian Nights’. Richard E Grant traces the roots of The Arabian Nights first broadcast on 27th April 2011. A link to the programme page with clips of MW discussing the Arabian Nights can be found here.
MW was interviewed for the Channel 4 documentary ‘The Bible: A History’ for Episode 4 ‘The Daughters of Eve’, broadcast 14th February 2010, programme details can be found here.
MW was interviewed for the documentary film about painter, poet and writer Leonora Carrington 'Open Up Stone Door' Directed by Dominique et Julien Ferrandou for Seven Doc Films, France. Available on DVD here.
April 8th, 2010 6.30pm for Royal Society of Literature ‘Reading the Universe: Alberto Manguel’, chaired by Marina Warner recorded at 1 Belgrave Square, London. An audio recording of this event can be heard here.
MW was interviewed for ‘Une vision politique et historique’ as part of 'Elles @ Pompidou' Women Artists in the Pompidou Collection', Pompidou Centre, Paris, 2011. The video can be streamed below.
World Literature Weekend for London Review of Books, 19th August 2009.
Marina Warner addressed the wide variation in translated versions of Russian texts. Her conversation with Robert Chandler focuses on Andrey Platonov in particular. Chandler has translated and co-translated several of Platonovs novels, including, with Elizabeth Chandler and Olga Meerson, a new edition of the absurdist parable The Foundation Pit, Platonovs most overtly political book, written in direct response to the brutalities of Stalins collectivisation of Russian agriculture. It is a literary masterpiece which deforms and transforms language in seeking to evoke unspeakable realities. This English translation is the first and only one to be based on the definitive edition published by Pushkin House in Moscow.
17th December 2008
A Discussion on Edward Said with Marina Warner at (NYU Abu Dhabi Institute).
The late Edward W. Said was one of the most formidable public intellectuals and cultural critics of the last fifty years. He is remembered chiefly for his highly influential Orientalism, his detailed critique of cultural and intellectual imperialism in the colonial period. Orientalism is a - perhaps the - founding text of the post-colonial study of literature, culture and politics.
It also eclipses his other works in public consciousness and memory, and can lead one to forget the author's interest in literature tout court. The more purely literary aspect of his scholarship was explored in this conversation, with its starting point in a reading of The World, the Text, and the Critic.
More information can be found here. A video of the conversation can be found by clicking on the poster below.
MW gave the talk 'The Voice of the Toy: Writing Magic and Enchanted States' at Stanford University, USA on 14 April 2008. Marina Warner’s talk included bottle imps, genies in lamps, flying carpets, speaking fruits, toys, and severed heads. Touching on the influence of “Arabian Nights” and other Eastern narratives on western European fictions, Warner discussed the changing uses of enchantment in contemporary imagination, the different states of belief and disbelief that are developing, and the experience of the “digital uncanny.” The video can be streamed below.
