Diary Archive 2012 – 2016

DIARY ARCHIVES 2012-2014

2012

Stranger Magic and Fairytale talks throughout 2012.

22nd May 2012
‘Family Romances: Daughters of Eve; Sisters of Cain’, Lecture at the Freud Museum.

1st August 2012
After Grimm: Fairy Tales and Story Telling
Tale Writing Competition

25th August 2012, 5pm
‘How Magic Helped Create The Modern World’
The Folio Society event, Edinburgh Book Festival

We live in a secular age, in which we have elevated humanism and scientific rationalism above all other approaches. Marina Warner challenges this with her erudite and deeply engaging book Stranger Magic. She argues that magic is a necessary part of our lives and demonstrates this via a journey taking in Greek gods, Gilgamesh and Prospero and the Arabian Nights. Magic, argues Warner, is a way of dreaming the impossible.

August 2012
Marina Warner introduced The Folio Society’s edition of The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories in conversation with Folio Society editor Johanna Geary.

26th August 2012
Edinburgh International Festival 2012 – Encounters: Magic & Enchantment.

Writer Marina Warner, Wagner specialist Derek Watson and Dmitry Krymov, director of A Midsummer Night’s Dream (As You Like It), examine the roles of myth, fairytale and enchantment in culture and creativity. Chaired by the Head of Literature for the British Council, Susie Nicklin.

6th – 8th September 2012
‘The Singing Bone: Animate Affinities from Lotte Reiniger to Florence and the Machine’, as part of After Grimm: Fairy Tales and Story Telling, Kingston University.

2012 is the bicentenary of the publication of the first volume of the Kinder und Hausmärchen [Children’s and Household Tales] by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm. As this groundbreaking collection moves into its third century, this conference explores the trajectory of the Grimm phenomenon in Britain and the English-speaking world. Examining the varied and colourful reception history of this collection of tales, this conference will discuss the most recent fairy- tale scholarship, as well as looking forward to possible future developments. The Grimm bicentenary will also be celebrated through story-telling events, readings, a creative writing prize, and an exhibition of illustrations. Confirmed Keynote Speakers: Donald Haase, Neil Philip, Marina Warner, Jack Zipes.

15th September, 7-10pm
Marina contributed a reading to the temporary radio station Writtle Calling / 2EmmaToc broadcasting from the Essex landscape 11-18 September 2012. The grounds of Writtle College, Writtle College, Chelmsford, Essex CM1 3RR, Essex, CM1 3RR.

16 September, 3pm
Moby-Dick: Big Read. Part of the Peninsula Arts launch at the Plymouth University

30th September 2012, 1.30pm
Marina Warner: Stranger Magic: Charmed States and The Arabian Nights, County Buildings, Main Hall, Wigtown Book Festival 2012

The Middle Eastern folk stories of The Arabian Nights arrived in Europe in translation 300 years ago, and proceeded to fire the imaginations of artists from Mozart and Coleridge, to Italo Calvino and Angela Carter. Using familiar and lesser known tales, Marina Warner discusses why The Arabian Nights and its brand of magical thinking have been so influential. In conversation with Tahir Shah, author of In Arabian Nights.

3rd October 2012, 6.00pm
Circolo dei Lettori, Torino/Turin

5th October 2012, 6.00 pm
With Kiki Smith – at Merz Foundation

13th October 2012
‘Memory’ Marathon, Serpentine Gallery
The Serpentine Gallery Memory Marathon is the seventh in the Gallery’s acclaimed Marathon series. This two-day event will be an exploration of memory, archaeological excavation, historical recordings as well as digital storage and the effect electronicpreservation has on human memory.

14th October 2012, 1.30 pm
Conversation ‘Attention! Criticism and its Distractions’, with Brian Dillon, Orit Gat, Marina Warner at Frieze Art Fair. See more here.

17th October 2012
The Rumpus Interview with Marina Warner by Nina Moog.

26th October 2012, 4.00pm
‘Enchanting Reason’ with Harold Bloom, NYU Abu Dhabi, New York

27th October 2012, 7-9pm
“Stranger Magic,” a discussion between Marina Warner and George Prochnik on October 27th at Cabinet, 300 Nevins Street, Brooklyn New York.

30th -31st October 2012
Maryland Institute of Art.

November 2012
Brian Dillon interviews Marina Warner for Frieze Masters, Issue 1, Winter 2010. Details can be fiound here.

13th November 2012
‘Travelling Texts, Eastern Approaches : Italian Fabulism and the 1001 Nights’
Leconfield Lecture, Italian Institute London.

17th November 2012
Aldeburgh: Documentary Film Festival, screening of Marwencol
Cultural historian Marina Warner, Professor of Neurology, John Morton and Diana Quick discussed the film’s themes in a highly informative after screening session.

21st November 2012, 10.30am
‘The shade and the screen: Lotte Reiniger’s shadowplay’
Opening talk in the conference The Shadow of Language, Royal College of Art, London.

23rd -26th November 2012
Lausanne – details to follow

December 2012
Marina contributes ‘The Writing of Stones’ (pp.295- 30) and ‘Pleasure’( pp.505-514 ) in Curiosity and Method: Ten Years of Cabinet Magazine, published by Cabinet Books, New York, 2012.

4th December 2012, 6.30pm
The BP British Art Lecture: Marina Warner ‘Iconoclashes: Is contemporary art a matter of faith’ held at Tate Britain, Auditorium.

Contemporary artists profane taboos and create new zones of the sacred, often drawing on votive, ritual, and amuletic techniques from religious tradition. Marina Warner will explore belief in art today.

7th- 8th December 2012
Talk on Pain for conference at Birkbeck, organised by Joanna Burke. The website for The Birkbeck Pain Project can be found here and the publication ‘Pain and Its Meanings’ can be downloaded as a pdf.

13th December 2012
Networks of Circulation, conference at SOAS. Details to follow.

17- 20th December 2012
Grimm 2012, Conference, Lausanne. Details to follow.

13 December 2012
‘Away with the fairies: Grimm Thoughts on BBC Radio 4’ a review by Antonia Quirke, published in The New Statesman,

17^th-28th December 2012
Grimm Thoughts on BBC Radio 4

To mark the bicentenary of the Grimm brothers’ tales, writer Marina Warner explores selected stories from a new angle each day. In the first programme, she tells the story of the brothers themselves. With beautifully narrated extracts from the tales themselves and contributions from renowned academics and artists who work closely with the Grimm’s rich heritage.

Broadcast on BBC Radio 4 between 1.45-2pm weekdays beginning on 17th December 2012:

Episode 1 broadcast: 17th December 2012
Marina Warner introduces the Grimm brothers and examines the story of The Frog King.

Episode 2 broadcast: 18th December 2012
Marina Warner traces Grimms’ tales back to their ancient origins.

Episode 3 broadcast: 19th December 2012
Marina Warner enters the magical worlds of the fairy tale.

Episode 4 broadcast: 20th December 2012
Marina identifies real people and places believed to have inspired the Grimms’ collection.

Episode 5 broadcast: 21st December 2012
Marina Warner is drawn into the tales’ rich history of illustration.

Episode 6 broadcast: 24th December 2012
Marina Warner probes the fate of the tales at the hands of the Nazis.

Episode 7 broadcast: 25th December 2012
Marina examines the deeper meanings read into the tales by writers and psychologists.

Episode 8 broadcast: 26th December 2012
Marina Warner explores the Grimm brothers’ tales.

Episode 9 broadcast: 27th December 2012
Marina Warner examines the tales’ history of censorship.

Episode 10 broadcast: 28th December 2012
Marina Warner considers the future of the Grimm brothers’ tales.

BBC 4 Great Artists in their Own Words – BBC 4.

2013

The Symbol Gives Rise to Thought and other work on art, publication in 2013, date tbc.

January 2013
Marina contributes the essay ‘Monstrous Mothers’ to “Witches: Hunted, appropriated, empowered, queered’ edited by Anna Colin, published by Editions B42, Paris 2012, co-published with Maison Populaire, Montreuil.

2nd February 2013, 12pm
Spring, PLACE: Roots – Journeying Home
Marina Warner on Looking for Home Elsewhere: Apocryphal landscapes and narrative ghosts With Ronald Blythe, Paul Kildea, Ali Smith, Marina Warner, Patrick Wright and Full Circle Editions. Opening with reflections on Benjamin Britten’s journeys and sense of settlement by Paul Kildea, who has written a major new biography of Britten, the day features an exclusive, original meditation from prize-winning author Marina Warner. Celebrated novelist Ali Smith advocates for the remarkable Orcadian film-maker Margaret Tait and shows her magical 16mm films, and Ronald Blythe tells the story of his own house and its illustrious occupants.

4th February 2013
Judge for the John Florio Prize Awards party.

7th February 2013
Marina contributes the essay introduction ‘Icons of Modern Life’ to Man Ray Portraits, which also includes a survey of Man Ray’s published work in leading magazines by exhibition curator Terence Pepper, and an illustrated chronology of the artist’s life and career by Helen Trompeteler. A fully-illustrated catalogue accompanying the exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery.

15th February 2013, 8pm
‘Empress and Essex Girl: The True History of St. Helena’ at Stour Valley Lecture, Constable Hall, East Bergholt
Saint Helena was born in Colchester, the daughter of Old King Cole – at least according to one version of history. She went on to become the Empress Mother of Constantine who converted the Roman Empire to Christianity; in old age, she set out to find the True Cross, and sent relics of it all over the world, to found churches. in an illustrated talk, Marina Warner will explore this neglected local heroine, through art and literature, including the frescoes of Piero della Francesca and the unexpected novel by Evelyn Waugh, which he considered his very best.

22nd February 2013, 3pm
Alf layla wa-layla : Les Mille et une Nuits / The Arabian Nights.
Atelier sur les contes orientaux / A workshop on Oriental Tale Telling
‘Contes orientaux en Occident’ Rencontre autour des Mille et une Nuits, avec Marina Warner et Aboubakr Chraibi. Marina Warner and Aboubakr Chraibi in conversation. Held at Maison Française d’Oxford.

25th February 2013
‘Marina Warner and the cult of Mary’

Marina Warner talks to Peter Stanford about the reissue of her study on the cult of the Virgin Mary for The Telegraph, 25^th February 2013.

2nd March 2013
Walsingham lecture.

2nd March 2013
Marina Warner’s Stranger Magic winner of Critcism section at National Book Critics Circle Awards Ceremony for Publishing Year 2012.

5th March 2013
Marina Warner’s Stranger Magic nominated for Sheikh Zayed Book Award 2012-2013.

9th March 2013 11am-Evening
Ronald Blythe – A Celebration at Stoke-by-Nayland church, Suffolk
A day of talks, readings, films and music reflecting the career of Dr Ronald Blythe as he celebrates his 90th birthday. With contributions from naturalist and author Richard Mabey, Dr James Canton, and Dr Marina Warner from Essex University. There will also be music from the Aldeburgh Festival’s resident Quartet, films from the BBC archives, poetry inspired by the Stour’s rich artistic history and the day will be chaired by Lord Phillips of Sudbury.

16th March 201310.30am – 5.00pm
‘Talking on Water’, with Maggi Hambling, Caspar Henderson, James Attlee and many others.
The Essex Book Festival 2013
Day of readings and discussion about water in literature and science. Essex Book Festival 2013. Lakeside Theatre, Colchester Campus. A day of talks, readings and presentations on the theme of water, bringing together artists, writers and scientists. Other contributors include James Canton, Adrian May and Phillip Terry of the University’s Department of Literature, Film and Theatre Studies.

23rd March 2013
‘Kathryn Hughes: rereading Alone of All Her Sex by Marina Warner’ in The Guardian Review, 23 March 2013, page 20. First published in the 1970s, Marina Warner’s cultural history of the virgin mother was decried as ‘stridently’ feminist by some Catholics. The book marked ‘a private journey’ for both the author and Kathryn Hughes.

24th March 2013
‘Heroines and Myths: Joan of Arc and Cult of the Virgin Mary’
Marina’s Lecture as part of The Sunday Times Oxford Literary Festival
‘Professor Marina Warner’s studies of mythology and fairy tales have brought her much acclaim. Here she marks new editions of two of her best know works by discussing Joan of Arc and the cult of the Virgin Mary. In Joan of Arc: The Image of Female Heroism, Warner traces the portrayal of Joan of Arc through history and shows how she has been adopted and manipulated by different political factions. In Alone of All her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary, she looks at the changing symbolism of the Virgin Mary and the interrelation between Catholicism and the ideas of ideal femininity.’

Tuesday 26 March 6.20pm
Marina Warner interviewed in ‘The Royal Paintbox – The Movie: A Margy Kinmonth Film’
‘Screening with Q&A at Curzon Mayfair Cinema London. Details here. In a story previously untold on film, HRH The Prince of Wales reveals an extraordinary treasure trove of rarely seen artworks by members of the Royal Family past and present and explores a colourful palette of intimate family memory and observation. Shot in the spectacular landscapes of Balmoral, Birkhall, Highgrove, Windsor Castle, Frogmore and Osborne House, Royal Paintbox features artworks by members of the Royal Family down the centuries including some of HRH The Prince of Wales’ own watercolours and with contributions from Lady Antonia Fraser, Lady Jane Roberts, Charles Saumarez-Smith, Marina Warner, Jane Ridley, Catherine Goodman, Susannah Fiennes, Countess Mountbatten Of Burma, Sarah Armstrong-Jones and the voices of Penelope Wilton and Freddie Fox .’

April 2013
Marina Warner’s Stranger Magic: Charmed States & the Arabian Nights
WINNER – 2013 Sheikh Zayed Book Award
WINNER – 2013 Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism
WINNER – 2012 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism

Foreword by Marina Warner in ”Memoirs of an Early Arab Feminist: The Life and Activism of Anbara Salam Khalidi’ by Anbara Salam Khalidi translated by Tarif Khalidi, published by Pluto Books, London (2013) pp.8-10.

5th April 2013
Sarah Pickstone’s exhibition ‘The Writers Series’ opens Sat 6 April at New Art Centre, Roche Court Wiltshire by Prof Marina Warner.

17th April 2013
Keynote lecture by Prof. Marina Warner: “Burning the many-coloured fish: Re-readings in the 1001 Nights.” Edward Said Memorial Conference, Utrecht, 17 April 2013. What is this lecture about? “Is there a political vision for today in the stories of the Arabian Nights? Can Edward Said’s thoughts on contrapuntal interpretation and late style be applied to these fairy tales. Is oriental fabulism a form of polyvalent allegory? The Victorian translators and editors of the book were demolished by Said in Orientalism. But he expressed admiration for other interpreters, and new editions, such as that by Andre Miquel and Jamel Eddine Bencheikh in 2005, have revisioned the book with sensitive awareness of its context and meanings. Marina Warner will explore the question of the Nights in our time of antagonism, with special attention to ‘The Prince of the Black Isles’ in which a multicultural city is first destroyed, then restored.” Edward Said Memorial Conference was organised by the Centre for the Humanities at Utrecht University as one of the Treaty of Utrecht commemoration events on 15-17 April 2013. More information available at: http://cfhutrecht2013.com/. Watch back here or below:

23rd April 2013
Iain Sinclair visiting ‘Memory Maps’ course at Essex University

24-29th April 2013
Marina gave a lecture at the 3rd NGC Bocas Lit Fest, based in Trinidad and Tobago, the annual celebration of books, writing, and writers.

May 2013
Marina interviewed for ‘Great Artists in their Own Words’ Episode 1: The Future Is Now (1907-1939) and Episode 3: But Is it Art? (1976-1993), broadcast on BBC Four throughout May 2013.

Marina interviewed by Omar Berrada about Stranger Magic for Bidoun Magazine #28 Summer 2013 – read here!

1st May 2013
Liz Calder, editor and publisher, Full Circle Editions, in conversation with Marina
Art Exchange, University of Essex, for publication of Joan and Virgin Mary books.

2nd May, 7pm
Art, Sex and Religion: Marina Warner with Xavier Bray at London Review of Books
‘Cultural theorist Marina Warner will be at the shop to talk about her work with Xavier Bray, Chief Curator of Dulwich Picture Gallery. With Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary and Joan of Arc: The Image of Female Heroism, both recently reissued by OUP, Marina Warner was instrumental in setting out a specifically feminist way of writing about art and myth. 30 years after their first publication, Warner’s ground-breaking studies of the female form in art, myth and religion remain as thrilling as ever – ‘a Catherine wheel of exciting ideas’ as Antonia Fraser wrote in the Guardian.’

5th May 2013
‘A Right to Write’ Marina interviewed at BOCAS Trinidad by Sateesh Maharaj for Trinidad Express.

9-10th May 2013
Ovid and Seamus Heaney – seminar and readings, American Academy, Rome.

18 May – 25 August 2013
‘The Music of Myth’
Ever since myth gave birth to opera during the High Renaissance, the two forms have been inextricably linked, as evidenced by Glyndebourne’s two new productions, Hippolyte et Arice and Ariadne auf Naxos. An essay by Marina for Glyndebourne Festival 2013 book, pp.32-35.

2013 Warwick Prize for Writing Member of Judging Panel
Professor Ian Sansom will chair the panel of five judges : Vice-Chancellor of Monash University, Professor Ed Byrne and writer of fiction, criticism and history, Professor Marina Warner. The longlist for the 2013 Warwick Prize for Writing will be announced in May 2013, the shortlist in June/July 2013 and the winner in August/September 2013.

June 2013

Marina contributes ‘Contradictory Curiosity’ to the exhibition catalogue Curiosity: Art and the Pleasures of Knowing’ curated by Brian Dillon pp 25-41, the exhibition at Turner contemporary Margate.

6th June 2013
The Whitechapel Gallery, 8-9pm: Zilkha Auditorium
‘Discussion on Folklore and Modernity with Simon Costin and Marina Warner. Simon Costin is the Director of The Museum of British Folklore.
As part of First Thursday Folklore: Special Event at Whitechapel Gallery. Screenings, workshops and talks celebrating central/eastern European and British interpretations of the folkloric. Featuring interventions from The Museum of British Folklore and a debate on folk culture’s inherent tension with modernity.’

8th June 2013
‘Maps of the Mind’ Marina Warner on an inward voyage taken by a rival to WG Sebald and Iain Sinclair – Marina’s essay review of The Faraway Nearby by Rebecca Solnit for The Guardian Review, p7.

8th June, 6pm
Death in Plain Sight: Emily Wilding Davison, Modern Martyr as part of The Wilding Festival

13th to 16th June 2013
A multi-arts festival inspired by the remarkable story of suffragette Emily Wilding Davison. ‘Death in Plain Sight: Anniversary talk for Emily Wilding Davison, St George’s Bloomsbury, in collaboration with London Review of Books. Emily Wilding Davison’s death 100 years ago marked a crucial turning in the cause of women’s suffrage. Has the supreme sacrifice, such as Emily Wilding Davison made, become necessary for change to take place in the wider social and political sphere? Like most Catholics, Marina Warner was brought up on stories of female martyrs who defied all restrictions in acts of spectacular heroism. She will explore contemporary ideas of political sainthood in relation to Davison and others.

27th June 2013, 7pm
‘Helen Chadwick film evening’ at Richard Saltoun Gallery,including rare screening of ‘In Conversation: Helen Chadwick with Marina Warner at ICA, 1986’.

28th June 2013, 7.30pm
Marina judged as part of The Essex Dionysia
Performed by LiFTS students, the five plays are those shortlisted from the LiFTS Playwriting Competition. Mythic, poetic, lyrical, experimental, sharply contemporary. . . there’s something for everyone. The five plays are:
Mistranslations by Liv Jones
You’re So Cool by Luke Hayes
Bran the Fisherman by Jack Lang
The Lark Ascending by Hannah Broad
Boom Boom Terror by Cassie Catchpole and David Garlick

July 2013

Marina was elected Honorary Fellow at Mansfield College, Oxford

Marina was elected Honorary Fellow at St Cross College, Oxford

Marina was interviewed about Stranger Magic in Bint Al Khaleej – UAE – Arabic Magazine,Issue 87.

Marina contributed an essay on The Plague by Albert Camus to Brick, A Literary Journal, Number 91, Summer 2013, page 112.

2nd July 2013, 2pm
Fishskin Trousers a new play by Elizabeth Kuti performed at Gielgud Theatre, RADA, London with a post show discussion with Marina Warner.

12th July 2013, 7pm
Marina Warner in conversation with Abdelfattah Kilito at London Review of Books.

17th August 2013
Marina interviewed in The Age newspaper about Melbourne Writers Festival.
‘As a novelist, historian and ‘mythographer’, Marina Warner explores the enduring power of fairytales. On her way to this month’s festival, she talks about the cult of the Virgin Mary and explores the tales that colour our culture.’

August 2013
Marina has contributed an essay for Lotte Reiniger’s film The Adventures of Prince Achmed, re-released on DVD and Blue Ray special edition by BFI London.

August 2013
Ali Smith: Contemporary Critical Perspectives Editor(s): Monica Germana, Emily Horton, Foreword by Marina Warner, published by Bloomsbury July 2013.

20th August 2013, 6pm
‘Fatal Magic: The Attractions of Witchcraft’
Hawthornden Lecture Theatre – Gardens Entrance (Scottish National Gallery), Edinburgh Book Festival
‘The power of spells and charms can bring about metamorphosis – of the witch herself or of her victims. Bodies change into other forms, are disfigured or transfigured. Once approached with fear and loathing by mostly male artists, the witch now exercises fascination for women interpreters. Writer Marina Warner will look at the way seductive sorceresses in myth and fairy tale have been portrayed including Circe, Vivien, and Peri Banou from The Arabian Nights.’

30th August 2013
‘In Doha’ Marina Warner’s blog for London Review of Books.

30th August – 1st Sept 2013
Melbourne Festival

4th September 2013
Times Literary Supplement
Marina Warner considers Edith Hall’s “superb and richly detailed study” of how Goethe and Stalin, among others, obscured our understanding of Iphigenia’s time beside the Black Sea.

16th September 2013
Reading at Shakespeare & Co, chaired by Anne Marsell

30th September 2013 5-7pm
Boccaccio Lecture – ‘Voices without Borders Travelling Tales and Literary Heritage‘
Held at Room 349, Senate House, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HU
Several of Boccaccio’s stories include special motifs and plots with links to the Arabian Nights. Above all, the general character of his storytelling reveals lively interactions across linguistic and political borders. Can literature offer a contrasting perspective on the conflicts of the past? Where are the borders in the sea of stories? Marina Warner will look at ways in which customary oppositions and divisions are treated in the wonder tale or marvellous fictions of the Mediterranean.
Organised by the Institute of Modern Languages Research, University of London School of Advanced Study, in conjunction with the conference ‘Boccaccio and Company: An Introduction to the Decameron’ at the British Library.

October 2013
Marina has contributed ‘The reality bodily before us’: picturing the Arabian Nights ‘ to Fictions of Art History (Clark Studies in the Visual Arts) by Mark Ledbury and Michael Hatt, published by Yale University Press (2013).

4th October 2013
Lecture in Leeds

12th October 2013, 4pm
Wivwords Wivenhoe Literary Festival Reading

18th October 2013
Art is Just a Word, Oxford – reading and talk

30th October 2013
Blackwells Bookshop, Oxford with Caspar Henderson

Autumn/Winter 2013
‘Scheherazade’s Children: Global Encounters with the Arabian Nights’ Edited By Philip Kennedy and Marina Warner, NYU Press, Nov 2013.

9th November 2013
Pirandello Symposium, London with Roberto Cavosi – details soon

14th November 2013
Truman Capote Award Iowa Writers’ Workshop talk

20th November 2013
Richard Hoggart lecture, Goldsmiths University, details to come here..

9th December 2013
Mark Wallinger in conversation with Marina Warner – part of Literature Autumn Season 2013 at Purcell Room, South Bank Centre
Mark Wallinger, one of the UK’s leading contemporary artists and winner of the 2007 Turner Prize, has created a major new artwork for London Underground to celebrate its 150th anniversary. Labyrinth is a multi-part work on a huge scale — a set of labyrinthine enamel plaques installed in every one of the tube’s 270 stations. He talks to Marina Warner, the novelist and mythographer, about labyrinths, myths and mysteries.

5th-23rd January 2014
J-Term NYU Abu Dhabi Launch of Scheherazade’s Children, eds. Philip Kennedy and Marina Warner.

General 2014-15
The Man Booker International Prize 2015 judges were announced, along with creation of new e-Council. Chaired by writer and academic Marina Warner CBE, the panel consists of the novelist Nadeem Aslam, writer and critic Elleke Boehmer, Editorial Director of the New York Review Classics series, Edwin Frank and Professor of Arabic and Comparative Literature at SOAS, University of London, Wen-chin Ouyang.

 

2015

December 2015
Marina’s Alone of All Her Sex and Joan Of Arc were re-published in paperback in December.

2nd December 2015
‘From Alexandria to Babel’ – Alberto Manguel reviews The Meaning of the Library, edited by Alice Crawford, published in The TLS 2nd December 2015.

3rd December 2015
Marina Warner’s diary published in The London Review of Books (volume 37 number 23, 3rd December 2015, pp.46-47).

3rd December 2015
‘John Forrester: Historian and philosopher who wrote extensively on Freud and psychoanalysis’ – an obituary by Marina Warner was published in The Guardian.
The original version of the tribute can be Simon Schaffer’s tribute can be found on the University of Cambridge Department of History and Philosophy of Science site.

3rd December 2015
Reading the World: Challenging the Dynamics of Canon Formations
Senate House, London
Keynote Speaker – Marina Warner: ‘Finding Words: The Shelter of Stories in Times of War’

Co-hosts: Institute of English Studies, School of Advanced Studies and the Centre For Cultural, Literary and Postcolonial Studies, School for Oriental and African Studies.

“There is nothing mysterious or natural about authority. It is formed, irradiated, disseminated… it has status, it establishes canons of taste and value; it is virtually indistinguishable from certain ideas it dignifies as true, and from traditions… and judgments it forms, transmits, reproduces. Above all, authority can, indeed must, be analyzed.” – Edward W. Said

Literature can no longer be defined by one agreed upon, hegemonic literary canon. Newly generated narratives reflect continually shifting local, national and global identities. Twenty-first century globalized world literature raises questions concerning what and how we read and which literary, historical and aesthetic frameworks are used to judge artistic work. Fundamental issues of visibility, linguistic differences and literary dissemination arise around questions of who is published, how literature is disseminated (or not) and who gets to decide what is worthy of serious consideration.The proliferation of festivals, prizes and world literature courses suggest that a body of agreed upon first-class, canonical literature exists. But in reality, processes of ongoing canon formation, exclusion, gate-keeping, implicit aesthetic assumptions and other ‘bottlenecks’ operate locally and transnationally to silence vital voices. Marina Warner, novelist, short story writer, cultural historian, critic, mythographer and chair of the judges for the 2015 Man Booker International Prize will keynote the conference. . Her talk will reflect her profound engagement with literary shifts in our own complex, troubled time.

4th December 2015
Fly Away Home was reviewed by Imogen West-Knights in The Financial Times.
Read it here.

7th December 2015, 7pm
The Art of Short Fiction: Helen Simpson and Marina Warner, in conversation at The London Review Bookshop.

Marina Warner wears many hats, as cultural critic, mythographer, historian and essayist, but one of her best-fitting hats is her writer of short fiction hat. Her latest volume is Fly Away Home. Helen Simpson may have fewer hats, but is nonetheless one of the finest writers of short stories in the language. Her latest collection is Cockfosters. Marina Warner and Helen Simpson were at the shop to read from and talk about their work, debating the status of short fiction in the literary canon.

Listen back here!

8th December 2015
From ‘Translumination or Travesty? The Passage into English’ by Marina Warner published in In Other Worlds: The Journal for Literary Translator (Winter 2015, Number 46, pp 77-79).

12th December 2015
Marina in interview with Maitreyabandhu at London Buddhist Centre as part of a series of ‘Poetry East’ events in association with London Review of Books and Lit. East.

28th December 2015
BBC Radio 4 – Thinking Allowed: Rituals at Christmas & beyond

Laurie Taylor presents a special programme on the place of rituals in everyday life. How have they changed over time and do we still need them? He’s joined by Adam Kuper, Centennial Professor in Anthropology at the London School of Economics and Political Science; Marina Warner, writer and mythographer and Elizabeth Pleck, Professor Emeritu of History and Human Development & Family Studies at the University of Illinois.

Listen back here.

November 2015

7th November 2015
BCLA: AGM and Colloquy
The Keynes Library, Birkbeck School of Arts, 43 Gordon Square, London WC1H 0PD

The AGM is your chance to help shape the BCLA’s plans for the coming year. It will only last for one hour max, and will be followed by a lively collection of events including the award of the John Dryden Translation Prize and culminating in a talk and reading by the distinguished translator, poet and autobiographer Anthony Rudolf.

3.15 Annual General Meeting
4.30 A Celebration of new books in the Studies in Comparative Literature series, and the winners of the Arthur Terry Postgraduate Essay Prize
5.15 Reception and Award Ceremony for the John Dryden Translation Prize.
6.00 Anthony Rudolf: A talk and reading by the distinguished translator, autobiographer, poet and critic whose books include Silent Conversations: A Reading Life (2013).

10th November 2015, 10am
BBC Radio 4 Woman’s Hour

Writer Marina Warner appears to move effortlessly between fiction and non-fiction. This month she published a new collection of short stories, Fly Away; she explains how she weaves her love of myths and fairy tales into her contemporary stories.
Listen back here, from 12 mins 40 seconds, to hear Marina.

23rd November 2015, 6.00 p.m.
‘Creative humanities: a cultural ecosystem’
The British Academy, London

‘The creative industries are one of the UK’s great success stories, and the humanities in general have risen to the challenge of demonstrating the real impact they have on people’s lives.
The BSR – with its residency programme for scholars, architects and artists – is uniquely positioned to encourage reflection on the powerful intertwining of scholarship and practice, and the valuable synergies and benefits which accrue.
In this panel discussion, we will look beyond a purely economic assessment to identify the contribution of this cultural ecosystem at a national and international level. Our panellists will be:

• Marina Warner (Professor of English and Creative Writing, Birkbeck, University of London)
• Vernon Ellis (Chair, British Council)
• Patrick Loughrey (Warden, Goldsmiths, University of London)
• Jeremy Myerson (Research Professor and Former Chair of Design, the Royal College of Art)
• Helen Sear (Professor of Photographic Practice, Falmouth University; Representing Wales in Venice at this year’s Venice Biennale)’

24th November, 1st December, 7th December
Celebrated author and academic Marina Warner, who has recently joined Birkbeck, offered 3 classes on ‘Sanctuary’ in the autumn term of 2015. 

November 2015
L’Atalante: BFI Classic by Marina Warner, published by BFI Classics / Palgrave 2015, paperback.

L’Atalante has achieved legendary status over the past eighty years. This reissued edition of the BFI Classic features original cover artwork and a substantial new prologue that revisits the film and recent readings of it.

25th November 2015
British Academy new series of workshops in the Humanities: first one on Freud.

October 2015

Marina’s ‘Once Upon a Time: A Short History of Fairy Tale’ was shortlisted for Katharine Briggs Award 2015.

‘Fly Away Home’ reviewed by Rosemary Goring in Herald Scotland on 4th October 2015.

‘Fly Away Home’ reviewed in The Lady 16th October 2015.

‘With their unique blend of ancient myth and contemporary concerns, Warner’s stories are often dark, always gripping, with unexpected flashes of humour and clashes of the real and the supernatural. The legendary Mélusine is transformed into an iPhonewielding, sassy mermaid in a parable on desire and identity. When the relationship between a young dancer and her maverick patron takes a sinister turn, the girl escapes into an alternative world through the chinoiserie pattern on her curtains. Questions of gender and feminism, never far from the surface, are explored in a fresh manner. Warner’s writing is at its strongest when it eschews abstraction in favour of the physical – descriptions of human bodies, shimmering underwater creatures, miniature charms with talismanic powers. These are darkly glittering fairytales for our times.’

1st-25 October 2015
Visiting Fellow, Center for Ballet and the Arts, New York University – working with Joanna MacGregor and Kim Brandstrup on a new dance piece inspired by fairy tale.

8th October 2015 7pm
Amitav Ghosh, Elias Khoury and Sinan Antoon, The Center for Fiction, New York.
Presented in partnership with the Library of Arabic Literature.

On the occasion of the launch of the Library of Arabic Literature’s new English-only series of Arabic classics (published by New York University Press), Philip Kennedy, General Editor of the Library of Arabic Literature, together with Marina Warner, author and chair of the judges’ panel for the 2015 Man Booker International Prize, moderated a conversation with novelists Amitav Ghosh, Elias Khoury and Sinan Antoon. The distinguished panelists discussed the richness of the Arabic literary heritage as well as the thriving contemporary Arabic literary scene, the challenges of translating modern and pre-modern Arabic literature for contemporary English-language readers, and the contributions of the Library of Arabic Literature.

The initial list of English-only paperbacks include: Ahmad Faris al-Shidyaq’s Leg Over Leg: Volumes One and Two, and Volumes Three and Four, translated by Humphrey Davies; Al-Shafi’i’s The Epistle on Legal Theory, translated by Joseph E. Lowry; Ma’mar ibn Rashid’s The Expeditions: An Early Biography of Muhammad, translated by Sean W. Anthony.

8th October 2015
‘Fly Away Home by Marina Warner review – short stories tinged with fairytale’ by Suzi Feay published in The Guardian.

‘Warner weaves a world of myths, mermaids and male monsters, but the best stories here explore less familiar themes’

‘Marina Warner’s soaring new story collection Fly Away Home echoes with the author’s signature concerns about life’s mysteries, wonders and perplexities through myth, history and the present. ‘ – Mark Reynolds interviews Marina Warner in Bookanista.

13th October 2015 6pm
The New School’s Theresa Lang Community and Student Center, 2nd Floor, 55 W. 13th St., New York.

The New School’s Centre for Public Scholarship hosts discussion on ‘problematic future of higher education’. The Center for Public Scholarship at The New School presents the 7th Public Voices lecture series, a discussion of the ways in which higher education is being shaped and reshaped by politics.
The discussion takes place in the midst of a major transition both inside and outside the classroom. Demand for college degrees in the modern workplace is growing, while costs to attend college are rising. This has led students in the United States to take out loans totaling more than $1 trillion. The result of this socioeconomic burden is the steady widening of the income gap, undercutting the benefits these degrees are meant to provide. And it’s not just the costs that are changing, but the classrooms, faculty and administration. Massive open online courses (MOOCs) were thought to be “disruptors” to the traditional university model, providing free education to the masses. However, studies, including one from MIT, reveal that virtual classrooms aren’t without problems, including high attrition rates and cheating. Andrew Delbanco (Columbia University), David Bromwich (Yale University), Richard Kahlenberg (Century Foundation), Marina Warner (Birkbeck, University of London) and Kenneth Prewitt (Columbia University) will serve as moderator of the discussion.

19th October 2015
Marina Warner selects eight films as part of a YouTube guest playlist for Frieze Magazine.

27th October 2015 10pm
BBC Radio 3 – Free Thinking

As Halloween fast approaches, Matthew Sweet is joined round the Free Thinking cauldron by guests including Marina Warner and Suzannah Lipscomb to consider the season of the witch. Film critic Larushka Ivan-zadeh and Claire Nally from Northumbria University review new blockbuster The Last Witch Hunter starring Vin Diesel, and consider the depictions of witches on film ahead of a screening of Vincent Price’s 1968 horror classic Witchfinder General. Catherine Spooner of Lancaster University and historian Suzzanah Lipscomb offer an historical guide to the famous witch trials from Pendle to Salem. And author Marina Warner discusses her father’s relationship with the ghost writer M.R. James.

28th October 2015
50th Anniversary Lecture – Professor Dame Marina Warner
The third of the College’s 50th Anniversary termly lectures given by Marina.

31st October 2015
A film of Marina Warner in conversation with Kari Jegerstedt in Bergen as part of the Holberg Prize 2015 was shown on 31 October 2015 on Norwegian National Television.

Marina contributed ‘Wild Ecstasy’ to Textus – English Studies in Italy XXVII (2014) No.3 edited by Lilla M. Crisafulli, September-December.

September 2015

08th September 2015
Cristina Iglesias and Marina Warner in conversation – an Artangel event
Instituto Cervantes Londres 102 Eaton Square London SW1W 9AN

Marking the publication of a new book about the multi-site sculptural project Tres Aguas in the city of Toledo in Spain, Cristina Iglesias discusses her work with writer Marina Warner and Artangel Co-Director James Lingwood. Tres Aguas, Cristina Iglesias’s sculpture project through the city of Toledo in Spain, opened in 2014. The ambitious project connects the historical citadel, its architecture so strongly marked by Islamic, Jewish and Christian cultures, to the fast-flowing waters of the River Tagus running below the city.
A new book, published by Turner, with an extensive sequence of colour photographs and important essays by renowned cultural historians Beatriz Colomina and Marina Warner, together with an introduction by Artangel Co-Director James Lingwood, reflect on how Iglesias’s sculpture interacts with the rich history of Toledo and the vital importance of water to the flourishing of the city and the life of the mind.

21st September 2015 6.30pm
Iain Sinclair & Marina Warner in conversation at Owl Bookshop, London

Iain Sinclair and Marina Warner were both at the Owl, talking about the common threads that run through their writing. Their common ground lies in stories in stones – Iain Sinclair’s new book Black Apples of Gower touches on the uncanny and the sump of myth as he walks back along the roads of his childhood in the Gower Peninsula – Marina Warner’s novels and non-fiction cover thoughts about places and memory in songs, tales, customs, fables and legends, her latest is a collection of short stories, Fly Away Home.

Marina has contributed ‘Chapter 7. The Library in Fiction’ pp.153-175 to The Meaning of the Library: A Cultural History. Edited by Alice Crawford, published by Princeton University Press (2015).

22nd September 2015
St Andrews: An Evening with Dame Marina Warner, part of the St Andrews Literary Festival 2015

September 2015
Marina contributed ‘The springs beneath, the flow above, the light within’ to Cristina Iglesias ‘Tres Aguas’, published by Artangel and Turner 2015 (pp 55-67).

September 2015
Marina contributed ‘Recycling Myths: Voices in the Dark, Dreams, Confidences, Sisters ‘ to The Power of Form: Recycling Myth, edited by Ana Raquel Fernandes, José Pedro Serra, Rui Carlos Fonseca and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2015, pp.6-29.

August 2015

Marina’s collection of short stories Fly Away Home published by Salt Publishing, Autumn 2015.

3rd August
Marina gives Dartington Festival talk: ‘Runaway Girls and Singing Bones’

24th August
Edinburgh Festival 2015

4pm – In conversation with winner of Man Booker International
8.45pm – With Charlotte Higgins in her series ‘Gods and Monsters’

25th August 3.45pm
Edinburgh Festival 2015

Marina gave a talk as part of Trading Stories at Edinburgh International Book Festival 2015.

Malta Mediterranean Literature Festival 2015
Marina gave a talk and a reading, Msida Bastion Historic Garden, Floriana, 8pm

The Xth edition of the Malta Mediterranean Literature Festivalorganized by Inizjamed will be held on Thursday 27th, Friday 28th and Saturday 29th August, at the Msida Bastion Historic Garden, in FLORIANA, with the participation of Tamim Barghouti (Palestine), John Bonello (Malta), Norbert Bugeja (Malta), Efe Duyan (Turkey), Rodolfo Häsler (Cuba/Spain), Moëz Majed (Tunisia), Hisham Matar (UK-Libya), Nadia Mifsud, (Malta/France), James Vella (UK/Malta), Marina Warner (UK), and Trevor Żahra (Malta).

23rd August
‘Once upon a time, redefined’ interviewed for The Times of Malta.

Are today’s zombies more nihilistic than Ovid’s shapeshifters and are our increasingly darker fairy tales a denunciation of the age of violence in which we live? Award-winning writer Marina Warner discusses these and other elements pertaining to fairy tales with Gloria Lauri-Lucente ahead of her participation in the Malta Mediterranean Literature Festival.

‘The lingua franca of yearning and inquiry – Marina Warner’ By Teodor Reljic published August 2015.

July 2015

1st July 2015, 7pm
New Stories for Old – Royal Society of Literature, London
The Courtauld Institute of Art

Natalie Haynes, Helen Oyeyemi and Dubravka Ugresic, chaired by Marina Warner.
Passed from generation to generation, and crossing cultural borders, fairy tales are more universal in their appeal than any other form of literature. But what happens when you shake an old story into a contemporary shape and setting? Helen Oyeyemi is one of Granta’s most recent Best of Young British Novelists. In Boy, Snow, Bird, she reworks the tale of Snow White into a cautionary tale set in 1950s America. In The Amber Fury, comedian, classicist and novelist Natalie Haynes explores what happens when five troubled Scottish teenagers who have been excluded from their schools are introduced to the Greek tragedies. And in Baba Yaga Laid an Egg, Croatian-born writer Dubravka Ugresic weaves the story of Baba Yaga into a meditation on femininity, ageing, identity, secrets, storytelling and love. The three writers discuss their work with novelist, historian and mythographer Marina Warner, whose short history of fairy tales, Once Upon a Time, was published to great acclaim last year.

The Man Booker International Prize 2015

The five judges who will trawl world literature for authors who have made a significant contribution are announced today. Chaired by writer and academic Marina Warner CBE, the panel consists of the novelist Nadeem Aslam, writer and critic Elleke Boehmer, Editorial Director of the New York Review Classics series, Edwin Frank and Professor of Arabic and Comparative Literature at SOAS, University of London, Wen-chin Ouyang.

7th July 2015
Ledbury Poetry Festival with Rowan Williams

6th-17th July 2015
Transmission of The World of Stories, BBC Radio 4

20th July 2015
Marina speaks at the British Academy ‘Perspectives on Education’ seminar.

26th July
Marina in conversation with Elias Khoury, British Library

July 2015
BBC Radio 4: What is a Story?

Marina Warner – in the company of leading contemporary writers – looks at the world of contemporary fiction. In each programme, she considers a story and story writing from a different angle. Marina is the Chair of the Man Booker International Prize 2015 and the series draws on the expertise of this year’s International Booker judging panel, the views of the shortlisted writers, as well as other key literary talent.

Marina speaks with writers as diverse as Julian Barnes, Michelle Roberts, Fanny Howe, Marlene van Niekerk, Alain Mabanckou, Lydia Davis, Edwin Frank, Elleke Boehmer, Wen-Chin Ouyang, Daniel Medin, Nadeem Aslam and Laszlo Krasznahorkai.

There are questions around the boundaries between fact and fiction which Marina believes are central to any consideration of storytelling, since readers’ pleasure depends so much on trust built up between the storyteller or writer and the audience. Over ten episodes, there are discussions on the reasons for writing, writers as witnesses and political interaction.

EPISODES
10/10 ‘As If: Dreams of Shelter’
9/10 ‘Ghosts at Home’
8/10 ‘Speaking in Parables’
7/10 ‘Is Anyone Responsible?’
6/10 ‘Filling the Gaps’
5/10 ‘History for the Record’
4/10 ‘Bearing Witness’
3/10 ‘It’s All Absolutely True’
2/10 ‘Why Write Stories?’
1/10 ‘First Times’

Produced by Kevin Dawson, a Whistledown production for BBC Radio.Listen again here.The Omnibus editions of the programmes were broadcast on Friday 14th and 21st August 2015.

July 2015
Man Booker chair Marina Warner: ‘I desperately wanted to be a saint’ Marina Warner interviewed by Nicholas Shakespeare for Newsweek 24 July 2015 pp 48-55.

July 2015
‘Marina Warner: What is a story? as told to Craig Brown’ published in Private Eye Issue 1397 24 July – 6 August 2015.

June 2015

2nd June 2015 6.30pm
Who Ate Marina Warner? at The Delfina Foundation, London

Reading by UK Associate Navine G Khan-Dossos followed by a conversation with Aaron Cezar, Director of Delfina Foundation. Who Ate Marina Warner? is a text based on the 1994 BBC Reith Lecture series, Managing Monsters by Marina Warner. In the penultimate installment, Cannibal Tales: The Hunger for Conquest, Warner discusses the place of cannibalism in mythologies in diverse contexts, from The Tempest to Hannibal Lecter. She links the fantasy of cannibalism to narratives of conquest, as well as exploring how the imagery of consuming the body speaks of longing and fear, identity, the past and the unknowable future.

For the purpose of this project, Marina’s voice, ensconced deep in the BBC archives, has been revived and replayed through a computer program that aims to return it to a textual form. Khan-Dossos sees this process as a cannibalisation of knowledge, a regurgitation of sorts, in which the computer is an extension of man, taking part in the process of consumption of the self and others.

This event is produced as part of the second season of The Politics of Food: Sex, Diet & Disaster.

2nd June
Birkbeck: William Matthews Memorial Lecture 2015
‘Translumination or travesty? : Reading the World in English’

Marina spent the last two years reading novels from all over the world for the Man Booker International Prize, which is given for a significant body of fiction by a living writer, as long as it is in English or in translation into English.

In relation to some of the writers who emerged (whose names will then be known), she will will discuss the character of global fiction, the difficulties of making decisions, and the questions raised by the domination of English as a world language.

4th June 2015
Marina contributed  ‘At the V&A: Alexander McQueen’ to London Review of Books, Vol. 37 No. 11, 4 June 2015, pp.24-25.

6th June 2015
Marina interviewed in Vårt Land newspaper, Norway, pp.40-41.

7th-12th June
The Holberg Prize was today officially awarded to British author, scholar and critic Marina Warner by H.R.H. the Crown Prince of Norway.

8th June
Postgraduate Seminar: ‘Living in Words: The Question of Myth’

9th June 9-1.30pm
Holberg Symposium 2015
12.00-1.30: The Holberg Lecture: ‘Losing Home, Finding Words: Transformations of Story’

11th June
Literary Festival, Oslo
From the Mouths of Stories: New Songs for Old Stories from the past give us all a language of the imagination with which we can form new stories for the present: Marina Warner and Tamim al-Barghouti read from work in progress inspired by myths and legends, from the Thousand and One Nights and contemporary Europe to the poetry of ancient Babylon and Iraq today.

21st June 12.30pm
Spread the Word – Short Story Festival, London
Marina read in Waterstone’s Piccadilly, with Deborah Levy and SJ Naudé also speaking with Cathy Galvin, Word Factory Director.

A review of Marina Warner’s Once Upon a Time, Martine Hennard published in Gramarye, Summer 2015 Issue 7.

‘ORIENTING FICTION’ – APRIL – JUNE 2015
Writers’ Talks and Seminar Series: Orienting Fiction, All Souls College Oxford

Professor Marina Warner (Birkbeck, University of London and President of the BCLA) will be convening a series of seminars titled ‘Orienting Fiction’ at All Souls College, University of Oxford in April-June 2015.

The eight-week programme is as follows:
Week 1 – 30 April: Abdelfattah Kilito, ‘Story-Bearers: Dante and Sindbad’
Week 2 – 7 May: Marina Warner, ‘Stories in Motion/Ways of Dwelling’
Week 3 – 14 May: Marina Warner, ‘”The Wondrous Flitting” of the Holy House: Mary in England’
Week 4 – 21 May: Ibrahim Al-Koni, ‘Vagabond Homelands’
Week 5 – 28 May: Marina Warner, ‘Elissa the Wanderer: Dido in Carthage’
Week 6 – 4 June: Hoda Barakat, ‘La narration dangereuse: nos personnages et la mise-en-abîme’
Week 7 – 12 June: Nacer Khemir, ‘Les deux labyrinthes: le récit des Mille et une Nuits et la ville arabe’
Week 8 – 18 June: Marina Warner, ‘Riddle Princess: Turandot in Paris’

For more information please contact : fellows.secretary@all-souls.ox.ac.uk or info.litteratures.arabes@gmail.com.

With the support of La Maison française d’Oxford and Mohamed-Salah Omri, OCCT and St John’s College.

Summer 2015

‘Book Talk’ Marina Warner interviewed by Anna Della Subin in Tank Magazine, Volume 8, Issue 4, pp 274-275.

”Joan Jonas: The Taste of the Clouds’ an essay for Joan Jonas: They Come To Us Without A Word’ pp 30-40 written by Marina Warner published by Hatje Cantz, Germany 2015.

May 2015

11th May
The British Academy Fairy Tale week, introduction with Marcus Sedgwick

17th May
British Library – Man Booker Prize

18th May
Birkbeck Arts Week: Curiosity panel in the afternoon with Brian Dillon et al.

18th May
In collaboration with PEN another Man Booker Int. writers’ event .

18th May
Marina wrote the obituary for artist and curator Felicity Powell, published in the The Guardian here.

Marina’s BCLA President’s Letter was published in Comparative Critical Studies, Vol 12, Number 1, 2015, pp ix-x1.

Marina’s story ‘The First Time’ translated as ‘A Primeria Vez’ published in Chimaera Textos: Contar um Conto, edited by Ana Raquel Fernandes, Mario Semião, introduction by Patricia Odber de Baubeta, published by Ulices Ceaul (Lisbon 2015), pp 235-250.

19th May
Announcement of Man Booker International 2015 winner

23rd May
Conrad Shawcross exhibition opening at New Art Centre Roche Court.

24th May
FICTIONS – THE MAN BOOKER INTERNATIONAL PRIZE – HAY ON WYE FESTIVAL
Event 109 • Sunday 24 May 2015, 7pm • Venue: Oxfam Moot
Marina Warner talks to the Winner
The chair of judges interviews the winner of this global prize, who was announced in London on 19 May. Previous recipients of the lifetime achievement award have included Chinua Achebe, Alice Munro, Philip Roth and Lydia Davis.

17 April 2015
Dissolving the barriers of literature: A conversation with Marina Warner about cultural diplomacy, remapping literature, and her upcoming conference on LAL at Oxford. Read here.

April 2015
MW interviewed for ‘All Day Long: A Portrait of Britain At Work’ by Joanna Briggs, published by Serpents Tail (pp. 155-163).

MW contributes ‘The Enchanted Garden of Ana Maria Pacheco’ to Ana Maria Pacheco: Sculpture (Norwich: Pratt Contemporary, 2015) pp15-19.

MW contributes the foreword to Consorts of the Caliphs: Women and the Court of Baghdad by Ibn al-Sai. Edited by Shawkat M. Toorawa, translated by The Editors of the Library of Arabic Literature, published by NYU Press, 2015, pp xi-xiv.

2016

14th December 2016
Visiting Pilkington Professor of Art History
Marina Warner – ‘Sanctuary: Places of safety, zones of exclusion’
Marina’s first event will be a public lecture ‘Sanctuary: Places of Safety, Zones of Exclusion’, on Wednesday December 14th, 5.30pm in the Samuel Alexander Lecture Theatre. More info can be found here.

 

 

 

 

 

 

10th December 2016
Word Factory: Creative writing workshop at Waterstone’s Piccadilly, followed by reading with Dubravka Ugresic and Joanna Walsh
This event was due to take place in March 2016 but was postponed due to illness.

Marina contributed a short memoir of Angela Carter for the catalogue of the show: Strange Worlds: The Vision of Angela Carter at The Royal West of England Academy, opening on 10th December 2016.

1st – 4th December 2016
Moscow: British Council authors’ trip to the Book Fair
Lecture by Marina Warner “Travelling Tales and Flying Carpets: Words on the Move”. British Council Russia, 4th December 2016, The State Tretyakov Gallery.
‘Myths, folklore and fairy tales are filled with impossible fantasies, irrational beliefs and savage scenes; yet they are an archive of human thinking about human existence. Marina Warner, following some of the roads stories have travelled, will explore the power of reasoned imagination, its capacity to connect with real life experience, and to redraw ideas of love, justice, and fate.’ Stream the lecture on YouTube here.

November 2016

Marina has contributed ‘Joan Jonas and the scene of time’ (pp.56-81) to Theatrical Fields: Critical Strategies in Performance, Film, and Video published by NTU CCA Singapore, König Books, London, and Bildmuseet, Umeå, Edited by Ute Meta Bauer and Anca Rujoiu. More information can be found here.

The Tongue of Adam by Abdelfattah Kilito, foreword by Marina Warner published by New Directions (2016) more information can be found here.

25th November 2016
Marina’s Lecture in series ‘Theory at the Megaron-Athens’

23 November 2016
The 2016 Longplayer Conversation with Marina Warner and Ali Smith
took place on at The Anatomy Theatre, Kings College, London as part of Utopia 2016. A recording of the conversation can now be streamed online.

22nd November 2016
Clara Florio Cooper Lecture, Taylorian Institute, Oxford
‘Sea-crossings, Survival, Stories’: Italians have long experience of diaspora, and Italy has also been the point of arrival for many thousands of refugees in the recent and current dislocations of peoples. Marina will reflect on the present situation in Sicily, where she has been working with the University of Palermo on a project for encouraging story telling in refugee communities. Can a history of migrations help build new bonds? Is literature be strong enough to help? What can traditions of narrative performance – puppetry, mime, cantastorie – contribute to societies in extremes of need?

20th November 2016
Buxton Literary Festival.

18th November 2016
Evening with Chirine al-Aswary storyteller and Samantha Herron, short story writers, on: Magic and Power in the Thousand and One Nights, at Rich Mix, more info here.

3rd November 2016
The David Fickling Lecture – Marina Warner – Stories on the move: suffering, sanctuary, danger
Can myths, legends and stories provide alternative shelter? Can literature offer sanctuary in times of dislocation and loss? A place where a refugee, a migrant, or a wanderer might feel at home? In today’s geopolitical upheavals, when millions of people are on the move, how do narratives travel between cultures and languages?
Available to listen back to this lecture here

October 2016
Marina has contributed the essay ‘The perforate Self or Nought is Not Naught’ to Anish Kapoor – Archaeology: Biology, Folio 043 published by MUAC Museo Universitation Arte Contemporaneo, UNAM 2016, pp 84-90.
Other essays by Cecilia Delgado Masse, Catherine Lampert, Jaime Soler Frost, Pablo Soler Frost, Douglas Maxwell, Hommi K. Bhabha, Lee Ufan and Julia Kristeva.

Marina has contributed an essay on Rastaquouères to the ‘verbal-visual’ issue of Oxford Poetry XV.ii, Summer 2016, the publication can be found here.

Marina featured in Shakespeare and Company, Paris: A History of the Rag & Bone Shop of the Heart edited by Krista Halverson (Shakespeare and Company, Paris 2016) pp 331. The book can be found here.

Marina contributed ‘Those Brogues: Marina Warner on her parents and other travellers’ to London Review of Books, Vol. 38 No. 19, published on 6th October 2016, pp 29-32. Read here.

Bloomsbury Festival 2016
Marina has contributed to the ‘Bridget Smith – Now It is Permitted: 24 Wayside Pulpits‘  The exhibition runs from 19th – 22nd October 2016 at Swedenborg House, London. Artist in residence at the Swedenborg Society, Bridget Smith, presents an exhibition of ongoing work Now It is Permitted: 24 Wayside Pulpits. Inspired by a collection of 24 New Church ‘wayside pulpits’ from the 1950s held in the archive at Swedenborg House, the exhibition features 58 newly commissioned visionary statements from invited artists, writers, musicians, playwrights and filmmakers.
Co-curated with the Swedenborg Society’s Director Stephen McNeilly, and designed by the Fraser Muggeridge studio, the posters will be on display at Swedenborg House, the Window Gallery in Conway Hall and around other Bloomsbury Festival venues 2016.

Contributing artists, writers, musicians, playwrights and filmmakers:
Jeremy Akerman, Chloe Aridjis, Homero Aridjis, Fiona Banner, Anna Barham, Rut Blees Luxemburg, Kathrin Böhm, Laurence Crane, Cullinan Richards, Clare Cumberlidge, Eileen Daly, Jeremy Deller, Arnaud Desjardin, Sarah Dobai, Tim Ellis, Simon English, Margarita Gluzberg, David Greig, International Lawns, Melanie Jackson, Sarah Jones, Ben Kelly, Hilary Koob Sassen, Andrew Kötting, Michael Landy, John Lawrence, Yve Lomax, Stephen Mcneilly, Melanie Manchot, Brighid Lowe, Michael Marriott, Andrea Mason, Jason Massot, Jeremy Millar, Fraser Muggeridge, Andrew Munks, Hayley Newman, Sally O’reilly, Cornelia Parker, Janette Parris, Dbc Pierre, Joanna Pocock, Clunie Reid, Olivier Richon, Ian Rickson, Giorgio Sadotti, Aura Satz, Rosalie Schweiker, Ali Smith, Bob & Roberta Smith, Bridget Smith, Barnaby Snow, Polly Stenham, Milly Thompson, Gavin Turk, Jessica Voorsanger, Marina Warner, Ian Whittlesea, Ken Worpole.

26th-28th October 2016
‘Travelling Stories: Vicissitudes of Arabesque’ at Transnational Italies, British School at Rome
‘The Italian community in Egypt during the first half of the twentieth century included many Jewish families who had fled Mussolini’s regime, for whom Alexandria and Cairo held out a promise of luxe, calme, et volupte, an Italy of the mind before the horrors and discontents of modernity. This modern Flight into Egypt included the novelist Fausta Cialente, author of Le Levantine and Cortile a Cleopatra, who confronts the dream of Oriental ease in her fiction. Cialente was also politically activist, and began a partisan radio station during the war, Radio Cairo, broadcasting to Italy. Marina will explore this transnational figure, in relation to the contemporaneous experience of other Italians in Cairo (includiing her own Southern Italian mother).
‘The subtitle quotes something Calvino writes in his essay on La Fiaba. I will try to explore ‘oriental’ motifs and structures in Italian writers, some of whom were part of the Italian community in Egypt.’
For more info please see here.

25th October 2016
University of Bologna Marina Warner – Losing Home, Finding Words: Voices In Motion
Dipartimento Di Lingue, Letterature E Culture Moderne Via Cartoleria 5
‘The meeting with the writer and mythographer Marina Warner will anticipate the days dedicated to the English writer Radclyffe Hall (1880-1943), during which the exhibition of a library collection belonging to Radclyffe Hall and donated to the Library will be inaugurated, and where a seminar of studies dedicated to the writer and gender studies will be held, in collaboration with the Sala Borsa Library and the Gender Bender Festival’
Presenters: Daniela Corona (Palermo University), Lilla Maria Crisafulli and Rita Monticelli (GRACE and GEMMA, Bologna University)

20th October 2016
Marina contributes to ‘Technology and the Human Future’
‘Internet: The ‘Always On’ Player and Life Itself’
Marina Warner, Professor, Birkbeck College, London. Winner of the Holberg Prize, University of Bergen.
Chair: Ane Farsethås, Cultural Editor at Morgenbladet, Oslo. Virginia Heffernan, author and journalist, former columnist, The New York Times, Elisabeth Staksrud, Professor, Department for Media and Communication, University of Oslo. Watch back here.

12th October 2016 7.30pm
‘HELL’ Find more here.
‘Cabinet magazine presents “The School of Death” – 6-14th October 2016 at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, organized by Simon Critchley and Sina Najafi. Cabinet magazine continues its series with a discussion on representations of Hell. Talks by author and curator Marina Warner and critic George Prochnik.  A quarterly magazine founded in New York in 2000, Cabinet combines the visual style of the design magazine with the investigatory approach of a scholarly journal to promote a new culture of curiosity. At the Centre Pompidou, Sina Najafi and Simon Critchley propose five events on the theme of “The School of Death”, in echo of Michel de Montaigne. The events will take different formats: talk, spiritualist session, operatic performance.’

2nd October 2016 6.45pm
BBC Radio 3 – Sunday Feature
Marina Warner interviewed for ‘ Philip French and the Critical Ear’ broadcast on BBC Radio 3 on 2nd October 2016 at 6.45pm. Listen back here.

1st October 2016
Marco Gambino in Otello by Roberto Cavosi, Rose Theatre

September 2016

Marina has contributed an essay to the catalogue of ‘Leonora Carrington / Lucy Skaer’ co-edited by the curator and Jonathon P. Eburne, Leonora Carrington and the International Avant-Garde (Manchester University Press). More here.

26th-28th September 2016
Stories in Transit: Telling the Tale in Times of Conflict / Storie in transito: Raccontare e racconti in tempi di conflitto
Museo Internazionale delle Marionette G. Pasqualino, Palermo

This workshop will explore four linked questions:
1) Can a shared story provide shelter for people who have lost their homes? Can a tale become a home? A lieu de mémoire? Can a memory of literature and the process of making it over and over again build ‘a country of words’ (Mahmoud Darwish)? Can narrative build a place of belonging for those without a nation?
2) Can imaginary, mythic narratives provide an expressive and helpful medium for contemporary testimony? Can make-believe help make-truth?
3) In conditions of fracture, loss, displacement, and hostility can contemporary media help exchanges of stories across borders and ease communications between languages and cultures?
4) Are cultural rights to expressing the imagination and passing on testimony part of human rights? How can these be supported in communities of refugees, asylum seekers and others who have left their homes for one reason or another?

Day One: The Shelter of Stories?
I Travelling Texts (a panel about what kind of stories are held in common) Can travelling stories be strong enough to help now? If they are a resource for survival, can something be done to encourage their traveling on? Would this be a positive resource?
II Archiving War: Whose story is it? Writing and storytelling workshop with participants’ choices of stories.

Day Two: Collecting testimony, transmitting memories I ‘I was there’: History, Imagination, and Personal Memories.
Relationship and interactions between them.
Refugees’ stories: Ways of telling: genre and mode, witness, lament, curse, entreaty, etc Heal or Hurt? Grief or Grievance? Effects of telling stories on the survivor: medical views from a psychologist and/or a therapist. Ethical issues: the ownership of the stories – authored artifacts and tales in general circulation

II The Practice of Stories
Processes of translation The question of different languages; figures in between (dragomen, interpreters, children)
Strolling minstrels, wandering players, rawati and bards. The Dwelling places of the story-teller – what kind of space is needed? (a Bedouin tent, an arena, a folding stage, a nook by the fire? How can the widespread use of digital media be harnessed to passing on stories? Exploring possibility of building an app or apps to prompt archiving and making narratives.

III Homo narrans: Human Rights to Culture?
Is the concept of cultural rights trifling besides the primary needs for shelter, nourishment, warmth, liberty?
Workshop Puppetry, masking, dance, music, recitation and other performative and story telling practices.

Day 3: Outing to Lago Pergusa where Persephone/Proserpina was abducted into the Underworld by the God of Darkness, Hades/Pluto. Her mother looked for her desperately afterwards…
Return to Palermo for a concluding gathering? workshop?

See more here.

19th-23rd September 2016
‘Culture and Resilience’, Rockefeller Archive Center , Bellagio, Italy

14th September 2016
Experimental Writing at Carroll / Fletcher
Dawn Poetics: Caroline Bergvall in conversation with Marina Warner
More details can be found here.

9th September 2016
Talk in Oxford for colloquium Telling Tales, Writing Stories: ‘ Stories without Borders: Voices on the Move’

August 2016

Birkbeck academics included in list of greatest feminist thinkers:
Professer Laura Mulvey and Professor Dame Marina Warner CBE from Birkbeck’s School of Arts are the only two living British women to be included in a book entitled Fifty-one Key Feminist Thinkers. Published by Routledge, the book includes feminist thinkers, historical and contemporary. Professors Mulvey and Warner are included in the list, alongside distinguished figures such as Sappho, Doris Lessing, Virginia Woolf, Simone de Beauvoir and Mary Wollstonecraft. Fifty-One Key Feminist Thinkers, edited by Lori J. Marso (Routledge 2016)
‘The feminist thinkers in this collection are the designated “fifty-one key feminist thinkers,” historical and contemporary, and also the authors of the entries. Collected here are fifty-one key thinkers and fifty-one authors, recognizing that women are fifty-one percent of the population. There are actually one hundred and two thinkers collected in these pages, as each author is a feminist thinker, too: scholars, writers, poets, and activists, well-established and emerging, old and young and in-between. These feminists speak the languages of art, politics, literature, education, classics, gender studies, film, queer theory, global affairs, political theory, science fiction, African American studies, sociology, American studies, geography, history, philosophy, poetry, and psychoanalysis. Speaking in all these diverse tongues, conversations made possible by feminist thinking are introduced and engaged.’

 

 

 

 

 

 

Marina contributed essay ‘Leonora Carrington: Badger’ to Leonora Carrington in The Viktor Wyind Museum booklet, Leeds College of Art. See more here.

18th August 2016 5pm
Edinburgh International Literary Festival
Marina reading and talk around Fly Away Home: Stories

17th August 2016
Ted Hughes’s Birthday dinner: after dinner speech by Marina Warner

1st August 2016 5.15pm
Talk – title to come

July 2016

‘Marina Warner on stories as thought experiments in times of turmoil’ – an interview for British Academy Review No. 28 Summer 2016, pp.34-39 the interview can be downloaded as a PDF here.

Marina contributed essay on illustrator Kay Nielsen and the fairy tales that inspired him ‘Dreams of Enchantment’ to The Folio Magazine, pp.3-7.

31st July 2016 – 5th August 2016
Dartington Summer School and Festival
11-12.30 daily, creative writing workshop on ‘Cross-currents in the Ocean of Stories’
‘Words from the wise: writing with Marina Warner’ – a blog report by Jessica Norrie can be read here.

22nd July 2016 9-30-12.30pm
Workshop

21st July 2016
Keynote lecture

20th-27th July 2016
ICLA Congress, Vienna

16th-18th July 2016
Marina read at West Cork Literary Festival
(17 July 8.30 pm reading; 18th July 10 am workshop)

15th July 2016 6.30pm
Marina spoke at Early Modern Society, Birkbeck

3rd July 2016
Refugee Tales, with Ali Smith, University of Kent

June 2016

Marina elected member of Academia Europae, a European, non-governmental association acting as an Academy
‘Our members are scientists and scholars who collectively aim to promote learning, education and research. Founded in 1988, with about 3470 members which includes leading experts from the physical sciences and technology, biological sciences and medicine, mathematics, the letters and humanities, social and cognitive sciences, economics and the law.‘

Marina has contributed ‘A Symposium on Crying’ to The Threepenny Review, Fall 2016.

Marina contributed ‘In the Time of Not Yet: On the Imaginary of Edward Said’ to Conflicting Humanities edited by Rosi Braidotti and Paul Gilroy published by Bloomsbury Academic 2016.

Once Upon a Time: A Short History of Fairy Tale by Marina Warner published in paperback by Oxford University Press, Summer 2016.

19th June 2016 11.30am
Marina Warner, Geoff Dyer and Lisa Appignanesi at The British Library

18th June 2016 4-9pm
British Academy showcase event

17th June 2016
‘Falling Idols’, lecture at The National Gallery London, also read this here.

15th June 2016
Aby Warburg 150: Work, Legacy and Promise The Warburg Institute University of London
Marina Warner: ‘Stepping beyond Words: Narratives on the Move in Times of Conflict ’
Venue: UCL Institute of Education, Jeffery Hall, 20 Bedford Way, London WC1H 0AL
‘On 13-15 June 2016, the Warburg Institute celebrates the 150th anniversary of the birth of Aby Warburg. At the centre of this commemoration we are holding a conference dedicated to his work and heritage. It will reclaim the centrality of Warburg’s thought and vision not only for the London Institute but for the world of international scholarship. A large group of distinguished scholars will discuss the implications of his thought for the history of art, images and cultures. The aim will be not only to illuminate the past, but to reveal the potential of his writings for the debate about contemporary cultural differences as well.’
Organisers: David Freedberg and Claudia Wedepohl (Warburg Institute)
Speakers: Andreas Beyer (Basel), Horst Bredekamp (Humboldt University Berlin), Robert Darnton (Harvard), Lorraine Daston (Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin), Georges Didi-Huberman (EHESS, Paris), Frank Fehrenbach (Hamburg), Uwe Fleckner (Hamburg), Kurt Forster (Yale), David Freedberg (Warburg Institute), Carlo Ginzburg (Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa), Christopher Johnson (Bilderfahrzeuge Project), Philippe-Alain Michaud (Pompidou Centre), Peter Miller (Bard Graduate Center, New York), WJT Mitchell (Chicago), Ulrich Raulff (Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach), Elisabeth Sears (Michigan), Salvatore Settis (Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa), Quentin Skinner (Queen Mary), Anke te Heesen (Humboldt University Berlin), Martin Treml (Zentrum für Literatur- und Kulturforschung, Berlin), Martin Warnke (Hamburg), Marina Warner (Oxford and Birkbeck), Claudia Wedepohl (Warburg Institute), Sigrid Weigel (Zentrum für Literatur- und Kulturforschung, Berlin) and Cornelia Zumbusch (Hamburg)
Listen back here.

10th June 2016
ITALY AND THE CLASSICS
Archive of Performances of Greek and Roman Drama, St Giles, Oxford

10.15am – Welcome (Marina Warner)
10.30-11.30am: Fin de Siècle Italy
(Chair: Matthew Reynolds)
Lucy Hughes-Hallett (Freelance Writer)
Michael Subialka (Oxford)
11.30-12.45: The Performance Arts
(Chair: Ela Tandello)
Eleftheria Ioannidou (Birmingham)
Rosella Simonari (London)
Simone Spagnolo (Anglian Ruskin)
12.45-2pm LUNCH
2-3.15pm: Early Modern Italy
(Chair: Glenn Most)
Martin McLaughlin (Oxford)
Matthew Leigh (Oxford)
Nicola Gardini (Oxford)
3.45-5pm: Film
(Chair: Oliver Taplin)
Maria Wyke (London)
Massimo Fusillo (L’Aquila)
6pm (JdP, St Hilda’s) – DRINKS RECEPTION
6.30-7pm: Pre-Performance Talk
(Chair: Marina Warner)
Jane House (Translator), Marco Gambino and Sasha Waddell, Roberto Cavosi (Playwright)
7-8pm PERFORMANCE of Roberto Cavosi’s Bellissima Maria (after Phaedra)

7th June 2016
Into the Woods: Fairy Tales of Home
Marina Warner in the second part of her seminar will look at: Angela Carter, Wise Children and Helen Oyeyemi, Mr Fox. Chaired by Russell Celyn Jones Part of MA Creative Writing at Birkbeck, London.

6th June 2016 5pm
Lecture on ‘Orienting Fairy Tales’, Keble College, Oxford

12th May 2016
Marina Warner will be the Humanitas visiting professor of Comparative European Literature for 2015-16
She will deliver a series of three lectures on the theme of ‘The Sanctuary of Stories’, exploring myths and myth-making. Dame Marina Warner delivers the inaugural lecture of her series on ‘the sanctuary of stories’. Find more here. Watch back here, or below:

Marina contributed to Cornelia Parker’s exhibition ‘FOUND‘ at the Foundling Museum
27 May 2016 — 04 Sep 2016
‘For this major exhibition, Foundling Fellow Cornelia Parker has invited over sixty outstanding artists from a range of creative disciplines to respond to the theme of ‘found’, reflecting on the Museum’s heritage. Combining new and existing work with found objects kept for their significance, the exhibition will unfold throughout the Museum, interacting with historic works in the Collection and with each other. Parker’s inspiration has in part been taken from the Museum’s eighteenth-century tokens – small objects left by mothers with their babies as a means of identification should they ever return to the Foundling Hospital to claim their child. Artists participating in FOUND include: Ron Arad RA, Phyllida Barlow RA, Jarvis Cocker, Richard Deacon RA, Tacita Dean RA, Jeremy Deller, Edmund de Waal, Brian Eno, Antony Gormley RA, Mona Hatoum, Thomas Heatherwick RA, Christian Marclay, Mike Nelson, Laure Prouvost, David Shrigley, Bob and Roberta Smith RA, Wolfgang Tillmans RA, Marina Warner and Rachel Whiteread. Twenty Royal Academicians are contributing to the show, echoing the role that the Foundling Hospital played in the development of the Royal Academy. Founded in 1739 to care for babies at risk of abandonment, the Foundling Hospital was supported by the leading artists of the day, many of whom donated work, thanks to the revolutionary involvement of the artist William Hogarth and the composer George Frideric Handel. The Royal Academy’s origins can be traced to the collective mobilisation of artists and the promotion of British art that took place at the Hospital during the eighteenth century.’

In ‘Finders Keepers’ Marina describes the intriguing item that she has contributed to a major exhibition of found objects curated by Cornelia Parker RA at the Foundling Museum  – for RA Magazine, Summer 2016 p. 24, also feastured in The Guardian, 25 May 2016 here.

31st May 2016
Back to Troy: Myths of War
Marina Warner looked at retellings, translations and transformations, and revisionings through returns to the story of the Trojan War, the Odyssey and domestic fairy tales. Chaired by Russell Celyn Jones.
Recommended reading: Christopher Logue, War Music; Elizabeth Cook, Achilles; David Malouf, Ransom.
Part of MA Creative Writing at Birkbeck, London.

29th May 2016 2.30pm
PUTIN AND POWER Svetlana Alexeivich. Nobel Prize 2015 – in conversation with MarinaQueen Elizabeth Hall, South Bank Centre London.

21st May 2016
Calleva Symposium on Make-Believe, Magdalen College, Oxford
MW lecture on ‘“Playing is reality”: Wishing, foreseeing and foresuffering all in myths and fairy tales’

13th May 2016 3-6pm
‘The Bearer-Beings’: Portable Stories in Dislocated Times
Translation and Criticism
‘Convened by Marina Warner, Weidenfeld Professor of Comparative European Literature, 2016 and President of the British Comparative Literature Association (BCLA) and Prof. Matthew Reynolds, Oxford Comparative Criticism and Translation (OCCT). This initiative is kindly supported by the Metabolic Studio.
On Friday May 13 2016 from 3–6 pm a small workshop will be held focusing on rendering Arabic, including literature from Sicily during the period when Arabic was one of the island’s languages, stories from the Arabian Nights (including verse passages), folklore, and the work of Tamim al-Barghouti. Foreshadowing the 14 May workshop, this workshop looks at the act of translation as a form of transmission. Writers with other languages to be used as bridges to Arabic are most welcome. Some material will be shared ahead of time. Limited to 24 in Seminar Room 8 of the Ruth Deech Building at St Anne’s College, Oxford.
This workshop will be followed by a workshop on the 14th of May.
These Oxford-based workshops feed into a 3-day workshop in Sicily in September 2016 that will engage with the expression, circulation, translation, and re-telling of stories in contemporary refugee and multicultural communities.’
Find more here.

14th May 2016 10-6pm
‘The Bearer-Beings’: Portable Stories in Dislocated Times Intercultural Literary Practices
Convened by Marina Warner, Weidenfeld Professor of Comparative European Literature, 2016 and President of the British Comparative Literature Association (BCLA) and Prof. Matthew Reynolds, Oxford Comparative Criticism and Translation (OCCT). This initiative is kindly supported by the Metabolic Studio.

On Saturday 14 May 2016 from 10 am–6 pm, Marina Warner and Matthew Reynolds will hold a creative writing workshop with the writers Philip Terry, Alice Oswald, Tamim al-Barghouti, and the storyteller Ben Haggarty. The workshop revolves around the concept of stories and their literary, oral, visual, or musical transmission. The workshop not only hopes to interrogate how individuals communicate stories in different cultures, spaces, and times, but hopes that workshop participants will create and ‘transmit’ their own interesting variations of ancient myths or more modern folklore. Participants are expected to come to the workshop with either a myth or folktale (from any place or era) in order to actively explore how the transmission of stories is a distinctive, energetic, and dynamic process. Participants are limited to 50, in the Seminar Room of the Radcliffe Humanities Building. Registration will take place at 9 am. The day will be interspersed with breaks for tea, coffee, and lunch.
These Oxford-based workshops feed into a 3-day workshop in Sicily in September 2016 that will engage with the expression, circulation, translation, and re-telling of stories in contemporary refugee and multicultural communities. Please contact Dr Eleni Philippou at comparative.criticism@st-annes.ox.ac.uk if you would like to attend either of these events.
More info on both of these events can be found here. Read more about the events in these PDF’s here and here.

20th April 2016 12.30 pm
Discussion and launch of Terence Cave’s new book, Thinking with Literature, TORCH, Radcliffe Humanities Building, Oxford
Thinking With Literature
Seminar Room, Radcliffe Humanities, Radcliffe Observatory Quarter, Woodstock Road, Oxford Bringing together cognitive sciences, philosophy, and the theory of communication, Thinking With Literature argues that what literature affords above all is a way of thinking, whether for writer, reader, or critic. We are joined by the author Terence Cave (Emeritus Professor of French Literature and Emeritus Research Fellow, St John’s College), who will discuss the questions raised in his new book 
with: Ilona Roth (Senior Lecturer in Psychology, Open University)
Marina Warner (Professor of English and Creative Writing, Birkbeck College, University of London) Deirdre Wilson (Emeritus Professor of Linguistics, UCL)
The discussion will be chaired by Emily Troscianko (Member of the Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages, University of Oxford). Part of Book at Lunchtime, a fortnightly series of bite size book discussions, with commentators from a range of disciplines. Terence Cave, professor of French Literature and the author of Thinking with Literature, discusses the cognitive function of literature and its creation of new ways of thinking; with contributions from Ilona Roth (Senior Lecturer in Psychology, Open University), Marina Warner (Weidenfeld Professor of Comparative European Literature, St Anne’s College, University of Oxford), and Deirdre Wilson (Emeritus Professor of Linguistics, UCL). Part of the ongoing TORCH Book at Lunchtime series.

8th April 2016 5.30pm
MW reading from Limiti Naturali, short story collection edited Laura di Michele and translated by Valentina Castagna. At the Museo INternaztionale G Pasqualino delle Marionette, Palermo. 

MW’s Fly Away Home includede in the longlist for Edge Hill Short Story Prize 2016, more information can be found here.

8th of March 2016 6.30-8pm
RCA Visual Cultures Lecture Series 2015/16 Rise up & Envision
Arabesque – Catherine David & Marina Warner
Gorvy Lecture Theatre, RCA Dyson Building For the forthcoming Visual Cultures Lecture Series we are pleased to welcome Catherine David & Marina Warner who will present their recent research and discuss gender, politics, and contemporary art. The conversation will be chaired by Margarita Gluzberg, Research Tutor at the RCA School of Fine Art. The lecture is free and open to all – it will be live broadcast by this is tomorrow.
www.rca.ac.uk/schools/school-of-fine-art/visual-cultures/

1st March 2016
StAnza 2016 – Scotland’s International Poetry Festival – St Andrew’s, Scotland
Marina Warner – The Way We Live Now – Is British culture a myth?
On the eve of StAnza, the Byre Theatre and the University of St Andrews will host a debate, sponsored by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, on the theme Is British culture a myth? The speakers will be the literary critic and writer Marina Warner, the poet and critic Robert Crawford, and leading academics Ali Ansari and Murray Pittock. The debate will be livestreamed to Cardiff where a parallel event is being held. All details can be found here.

27th February 2016
Word Factory, Waterstones Picadilly

MW contributed ‘Grief fills up the room’ from King John by William Shakespeare to Poems That Make Grown Women Cry edited by Anthony Holden and Ben Holden published by Simon & Schuster UK (25 Feb. 2016). More details can be found here.

Reading the World: Changing the Dynamics of Canon Formations – Keynote Address A video and audio podcast is now available for the Reading the World: Changing the Dynamics of Canon Formations – Keynote Address, held on Thursday 03 December 2015 at the School of Advanced Study, University of London. Speaker(s): Co-chairs: Professor Rose Levinson (PhD), Professor Francesca Orsini (PhD), Marina Warner This podcast is now available on the SAS website, YouTube and iTunes U.

11th February 2016
John Rylands Memorial Lecture, Manchester

10th February 2016
MW contributed ‘Visions of the Honeycomb’ an essay for Incidents of Travel in the Multiverse by AL and AL published by Cornerhouse UK 2016) pp 68-76. Published to accompany the exhibition at HOME, Manchester, 6 Feb – 27 Mar 2016. Curated by Bren O’Callaghan & Sarah Perks. More details can be found here.

3rd February 2016
University of Chichester
MW gives a reading about her recent collection of short stories, Fly Away Home.

30th January 2016
Malcolm Bowie Memorial Lecture, ‘Proust and music, politics and flesh’, will be delivered by Jacqueline Rose. The lecture took place at 2:30 pm on 30 January 2016, at Room B04, Birkbeck School of Arts.

‘Open Questions’ – An Interview with Marina Warner by Karina Jakubowicz in The Literateur.com on 14 Jan 2016 can be read here.