Marina Warner

2017

2017

Marina Warner’s Once Upon A Time has been translated into German – ‘Es war einmal: Die Magie der Märchen’, Aus dem Englischen übersetzt und kommentiert von Holger Hanowell, Reclam (2017). An extract can be read here and more information on the editions can be found here.

7th December 2017‌
Marina Warner’s Truth to be Told lecture: ‘The ‌Truth in Stories’ – at the UCD Humanities Institute, University College Dublin
Truth to be Told’ is a UCD Humanities Institute public lecture series in response to the emergence of what is called a ‘post-factual’ world. Marina Warner was introduced by Professor Anne Fuchs, Director of the UCD Humanities Institute. More info can be found here.

A video of the lecture can be found here and a podcast of the lecture can be streamed here.

Marina contributes ‘Floored by Wonder’ to the celebratory 500 page closing print issue of
Parkett, volume 100/101. More information can be found here.

‘Speaking Volumes’, Marina interviewed for The RSL Magazine Autumn 2017, p8-11.

Jack Zipes – Fiabe con le ali – Due secoli di immaginario fiabesco nelle cartoline illustrate, translated by Alessandro Ciappa, with a preface by Marina Warner pp 7-17, published by Meledonzelli Rome 2017. More info here.

20th November 2017
‘Teatro E Integrazione – I ragazzi Vanno In Scena, Giovanni Migranti Recitano In Strada, Spettacolo a Tappe Tra Giardini e Musei’ – An article on the Stories in Transit project in Palermo by Anna Cane was published in Giornale di Sicilia, November 20th 2017, p14, more info can be found here.

17th November 2017
Marina has contributed to the Books of the Year to The TLS, November 2017 page 20.
More info can be found here.

12th-14th November 2017
DANSOX: Rawaa held at the Jacqueline du Pré Music Building, St Hilda’s College, Oxford
DANSOX returns this term with an exciting programme of events. Watch the process of creating a new ballet over the course of a two-day interdisciplinary workshop with writer Marina Warner, choreographer Kim Brandstrup, pianist and composer Joanna MacGregor, and professional dancers.
Rawaa comes from Arabic – the root for words meaning ‘to water’ and ‘to relate’ and provides the dominant metaphorical motif of the ballet’s mood and movement. Affinities emerge between poetic metre, musical pulse, and water management (water wheels, aqueducts) in Arab culture. The ballet will offer a counterpoise to the orientalism of Scheherazade, exploring the inner lives and drives of legendary women performers from the Middle East who have attained mythic status.
The artists will collaborate on the ballet in a series of workshops held in the Jacqueline du Pre Building over the course of two days from 12-14 November. There will be a ‘showing’ of the ballet workshop on Tuesday 14 November at 5.30pm which will be open to the public – booking is essential for this part of the programme. A public ‘showing’ of the ballet workshop will take place on Tuesday 14 November at 5.30pm.
Book here.
A PDF of the days events can be found here.

3rd- 8th November 2017
Stories in Transit IV, Palermo

27th-28th October 2017
‘Speaking Right: Codes, Creoles, and Border Crossings
Marina Warner gives keynote address at ‘Constructions of Identity 9: New World – New Ideas’ presented by Babeș-Bolyai University Faculty of Letters Department of English Language and Literature, Cluj-Napoca, Romania, 27-28 October 2017.
More information can be found here.

Marina contributes an essay review of ‘The Book of Dust Vol.1: La Belle Sauvage by Philip Pullman’ for Book of the Week in The Guardian Review, 21st October 2017, p.6. The essay can be read here.

Marina contributed ‘John Ashberry’ to PN Review, October 14 2017, more info can be found here.

Autumn 2017
‘Tales of Wonder – Retelling Fairy Tales through Picture Postcards’ by Jack Zipes, with a foreword by Marina Warner, published by University of Minnesota Press, 2017, ppvii-xiii.
A pictorial history of fairy-tale postcards throughout the world from the late 1800s to the present, Tales of Wonder presents a fascinating look at how key scenes of fairy tales have been rendered over time, suggesting a rethinking and reliving of the tales through the years. Jack Zipes tells this intriguing history of the postcards as well as providing new perspectives on familiar stories. This highly illustrated volume offers a historic chapter in the cultural story of fairy tale as a shared symbolic system. Jack Zipes is the most learned and indefatigable historian and polemicist of fairy tale as a cultural phenomenon, and he has always been alert to the technologies of the stories’ circulation…. The speaking pictures Jack Zipes has archived here will never be repeated in this form again, as the stories migrate and come to inhabit new vehicles, new technologies of enchantment. Marina Warner, from the Foreword.
More information here.

27th-28th October 2017
Marina is a Keynote Speaker at ‘Constructions of Identity: New World – New Ideas ‘, Cluj-Napoca, Romania
International conference held in Cluj-Napoca, Romania, Organized by the English Department of Babes-Bolyai University. In its 20-year long history this conference has contributed significantly to research in literature and linguistics under its overarching main theme of how language, literature and philology research itself shape people’s perception of the world, of otherness, and ultimately, of themselves.
Keynote speakers:
Dame Marina Warner, Birkbeck College, University of London; All Souls College, University of Oxford
Codrin Liviu Cuţitaru, Al. I. Cuza University of Iasi.
Adina Dragomirescu, University of Bucharest (Faculty of Letters), “Iorgu Iordan – Al. Rosetti” Institute of Linguistics

19th October 2017, 6pm
Lecture at Summertown Library, Oxford – Professor Dame Marina Warner DBE President of the Royal Society of Literature
“Sanctuary: Can Stories Give Shelter?”
In an illustrated talk Marina Warner considers the role of literary imagination in times of turmoil and dislocation. Much-published author, academic and feminist, Marina Warner is a writer of fiction, criticism and history. Her works include novels and short stories as well as studies of art, myths, symbols and fairy tales.
Donations of £10 at the door to the Friends’ fund-raising gratefully received.

More information here.

16th October 2017
Manchester Festival 2017
Marina gives a reading of ‘The Mother’s Tale’ from Refugee Tales: Volume II. Event with Kamila Shamsie.
A recording of the reading is available on YouTube, here.

6th October 2017, 6pm
Marina gives the Graduate Lecture at Birkbeck, University of London

‘Consorts of the Caliphs – Women and the Court of Baghdad’, by Ibn al-Sa’i, translated by Shawkat M. Toorawa, translated by The Editors of the Library of Arabic Literature, introduction by Julia Bray, foreword by Marina Warner
Published by NYU Press, September 2017 as part of the Library of Arabic Literature series. More info here.

30th September 2017
Marina participated in ‘Small Wonder 2017 – The Short Story Festival’ – Charleston UK
Reading her tale from Refugee Tales with Neel Mukherjee, who read The Soldier’s tale.
Last year’s Refugee Tales session at Small Wonder made an enormous impact. Modelled on Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, the second volume communicates the plight of refugees and the experience of those who, having sought asylum, are indefinitely detained. Re-telling personal stories, Neel Mukherjee and Marina Warner illuminate individual suffering and survival. Marina Warner, who re-creates ‘The Mother’s Tale’, is a multiple prize-winning author of fiction, history, criticism and studies of myths. Neel Mukherjee, who re-tells ‘The Soldier’s Tale’, is an award-winning novelist whose new book is A State of Freedom. Anna Pincus has worked for Gatwick Detainees Welfare Group for ten years.
More info can be found here.

Legends of the Fall an essay review of ‘The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve’ by Stephen Greenblatt, published in The New York Review of Books, September 28, 2017, Volume 64, Number 14, pp.22-25. More info here.

27 September 2017
‘Marina Warner, Professor of English and Creative Writing at Birkbeck, is among those to be honoured by the British Academy for services to academia, with the award of a British Academy Medal. The British Academy is the UK’s national body for the humanities and social sciences, and the Medals are awarded for landmark academic achievement in any of the humanities and social science disciplines supported it. The Medals are awarded for landmark academic achievement in any of the humanities and social science disciplines supported by the Academy.’
More information can be found here.

26th September 2017
Inaugural lecture of Literature Matters, for Royal Society of Literature – British Library
‘Literature Matters: Imagination in Action’
Marina Warner on why literature matters, Chaired by Kamila Shamsie
The president of the Royal Society of Literature Marina Warner explores the relationship between stories and power in unsettled and unsettling times, in this first lecture of a new series exploring how and why literature matters. Can ancient myths, retold in different media, help build the common ground?
A Transcript can be found here.

25th September 2017
In Conversation: Rachel Kneebone with Marina Warner at The V&A Museum
Join artist Rachel Kneebone and writer Marina Warner DBE who share a passion for art, myth and storytelling.
The Lydia & Manfred Gorvy Lecture Theatre, Victoria and Albert Museum.
More info can be found here.

23rd September 2017
Stories in Transit III, to be held at Birkbeck, London

22nd September 2017
Stories in Transit III, to be held at Ruskin School of Art, Oxford

Wednesday 20th September 2017
The Sheikh Zayed Book Award presents – Exploring the ‘Arab Culture in Other Languages’ Prize
Marina Warner, Winner of the SZBA Arab Culture in Other Languages Prize, Dheyaa Al-Kaabi, SZBA Scientific Committee, Margaret Obank, Publisher, Banipal magazine. Moderator – Haitham Al-Zobaidi, Editor-in-Chief of Al-Arab Newspaper.
Event held at The Wellington Room, Lanesborough Hotel, London.

Marina has contributed ‘The difference in the dose’ published in Ladies’ Room, in response to a site-specific exhibition at The Edwardian Cloakroom, Bristol by artists Julie Hill & Catherine Anyango Grünewald. Together their works in materials such as ceramics, cosmetics, smoke and mirrors used the context of the Edwardian Cloakroom as a mise-en-scène setting, drawing attention to the feminine experience as independent, both spatially and intellectually, from the Gents. The book is published by Petrel (2016). More info here.

4th-10th September 2017
‘The Holy Footprint: Making Home on the Move’ Marina gave a reading at The House of Literature, Kunstnernes Hus, Oslo
Marina also spoke at the conference ‘The Power of Motifs’, which is connected to the exhibition.

Marina contributed ‘Report: Bearer-Beings and Stories in Transit/Storie in Transito’ to Marvels and Tales, Volume 31, Number 1, 2017, pp.149-161.
‘I report on the philosophy and practice of two events—”The Bearer-Beings” (Oxford, UK, May 2016) and “Stories in Transit/Storie in Transito” (Palermo, Italy, September 2016) workshops—as part of a project that aims to establish the right of refugees to cultural expression, to encourage displaced and dislocated individuals to tell stories, and to inspire them to draw on their own traditions and faculty of imagination.’ Please see here.

‘A Word from our president’ – President of The Royal Society of Literature Marina Warner, July 2017, the piece can be read here.

Marina contributed ‘Back from the Underworld,’ an essay review of The Work of the Dead: A Cultural History of Mortal Remains by Thomas Laqueur. Found in The London Review of Books, Vol. 39 No. 16 · 17 August 2017, pp 19-23. More info here.

Marina contributed ‘The List: Best Books’ to The Week, 29 July 2017 p29, more info can be found here.

30th July 2017
Dartington International Summer School & Festival 2017
‘Stories in Transit: Telling the Tale in Times of Conflict’, with Marina Warner, Alice Oswald, Peter Oswald and Tamim Al-Barghouti. More info to be announced here.

24th July 2017
Marina in conversation with Carol Mavor at the London Review of Books Bookshop
For her new book Aurelia Carol Mavor, Professor of Art History and Visual Culture at the University of Manchester, reflects in her latest book Aurelia (Reaktion) on the very particular place that fairy tales hold in our culture and in the popular imagination. ‘Aurelia is as strange, enigmatic, and full of magic as its subjects’ writes the essayist Maggie Nelson. Mavor will be in conversation with cultural critic, mythographer and historian of the folk tale Marina Warner.
More info can be found here.


16th July 2017, 3pm
West Cork Festival, Ireland
Marina read from Fly Away Home, more info can be found here

10th July 2017
Marina has contributed ‘Rawaa: A Dance Idea (For the qiyan or singing girls of medieval Baghdad)’ to Sharjah Biennial 13
Curated by Christine Tohme, Sharjah Biennial 13, Tamawuj unfolds in five parts from October 2016 through January 2018. Featuring over fifty international artists, the biennial encompasses exhibitions and a public programme in two acts in Sharjah and Beirut; a year-long education programme in Sharjah; projects in Dakar, Ramallah, Istanbul and Beirut; and an online publishing platform.

Marina’s Stranger Magic: Charmed States & the Arabian Nights has been translated into Arabic by Abla Owdat and published by Kalima (2017). More infomation can be found here.

 

Marina has contributed to ‘Conversations in Time’ a series of new conversations inspired by Suzi Gablik’s important book, Conversations Before the End of Time, first published in 1995. Artists, writers and cultural thinkers have been recorded today, broadly inspired by the question posed in Gablik’s book:
What is the purpose or role of art in an age of accelerating social change and environmental uncertainty?
These conversations and the audiobook of Gablik’s book are distributed within the Public Programme ‘Conversations in Time’, part of the European Capital of Culture Aarhus 2017.
Marina Warner in conversation with Jimmie Durham can be streamed here.

Marina has contributed ‘Floored by Wonder’ to Parkett 100/101 ‘Grounding Vision’, forthcoming.

Marina has contributed ‘Cairo Creole’ published in The Made and the Found: Essays, Prose and Poetry in Honour of Michael Sheringham, eds. Emily McLaughlin and Patrick McGuinness (Oxford: Legenda, 2017), pp. pp 2-14.

Marina’s ‘Fairy Tales – A Very Short Introduction‘ to be republished by Oxford University Press (2017).

June 2017
Marina became an Honorary Associate of the Archive of Performances of Greek and Roman Drama

22nd June 2017
Marina contributes ‘Corbyn inspired hope in young and old alike’ to The New Statesman, 16-22 June 2017 pp 44-45, more info here.

26th June 2017
Marina contributes to a discussion event at TORCH
University of Oxford, 26 June 2017, more details can be found here.

1st June 2017 6.30pm
Times of Love and Hate, lecture by Marina Warner
The Birkbeck School of Social Sciences, History and Philosophy at Birkbeck Woburn House, Main Hall, 20 – 24 Tavistock Square, London WC1H
Generated in the crossing of boundaries and contesting of borders, contemporary social and political conflict across the world is marked by questions of identity and belonging, by the use and misuse of history, and articulated in polarizing language within an increasingly prohibitive public sphere. Yet at the same time, new humanitarian movements and creative interventions are also emerging, crafting spaces of dissent, hope, and even moments of love.
Reflecting on her work with refugees in Sicily as part of the Stories in Transit project, Marina will argue for the need to create cultural spaces that enable imaginative, alternative stories to be told, for the power of thinking through material practices, and the urgency of supporting different ways that community and self can be made and remade.
There will be time for questions and discussion after the lecture and then join us for a drink to launch a suite of new programmes beginning in the School in 2017 and 2018, including: the MSc War & Humanitarianism, MA Public Histories, BA Human Geography, BA Archaeology & Geography, and BA Intercultural Communication & Language.
More information can be found here.

May 2017
Marina has contributed ‘Signature Measures: Julie Mehretu’s Disfigurations’ in ‘A Universal history of Everything and Nothing’co-published by Fundação de Serralves and Fundacion Botin with Mousse Publishing, 2017. The book features an essay by Suzanne Cotter and newly commissioned texts by Amin Malouf, published as part of Julie Mehretu: A Universal History of Everything and Nothing at Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art, Porto, Portugal.
More info can be found here. 

May 11, May 25, June 6 , June 25 2017
Arabic Poetry and Stories Translation Workshops
‘It was and it was not…’: Translation in Action  (from Arabic into English) Professor Marina Warner (Birkbeck), Professor Wen-chin Ouyang (SOAS), in conjunction with the Contemporary Poetics Research Centre, Birkbec, directed by Steve Willey

Workshop Topics and Dates:
Workshop 1: May 11 The writer  Hanan al- Shaykh will discuss her work..
Topic: The Wiles of Women. Poetry and Stories from The 1001 Nights (2:30 to 5:30 pm, SOAS, B104)
Public reading. 6.30-8.00 pm  (SOAS, B104)
Workshop 2: May 25 The writer Hoda Barakat will discuss her work.
Topic: Mad Love. Nizami, The Seven Pavilions: The Tale of Leila and Majnun” (2:30 to 5:30 pm, SOAS, SWLT)
Public reading, 6.30-8.00pm, SOAS SWLT.
Workshop 3: June 6 Writer tbc. Islamic Sicily or Siculo-Arab Literature: poems of Ibn Hamdis and others, and fables from Ibn Zafer, Solwan or the Waters of Comfort (Birkbeck, Room 102, 30 Russell Square)
Workshop 4: June 27 Writer tbc, The poetry and stories of the Abbasid qiyan (Birkbeck , Room 102, 30 Russell Square)
Final workshop in September/October will showcase the work completed over the summer.

Participants:
16 places for CHASE PhD students; 10 places reserved for independent translators and scholars, for a total of 20 for each workshop.

Objectives:
A: The workshops proposed will adapt methods used for bringing Greek tragedy to an Anglophone reader and apply them to Arabic literature.
With the help of scholars of Arabic literature, who are interested in the wider transmission and enjoyment of their subject, students will work alongside poets, dramatists, translation theorists, and writers of fiction, in order to revision (‘awaken’) Arabic literary texts for contemporary readers/audiences.
It has become customary, for example, for a poet with no Greek or Anglo-Saxon to re-inhabit a myth or a legend and bring it to vigorous new life– famous examples include Seamus Heaney’s Beowulf, Simon Armitage’s King Arthur, and the inspired contemporary revoicings of Ovid by Timberlake Wertenbaker and Kate Tempest. By contrast, the riches of classical and traditional literature in Arabic have in some sense been kept from those who cannot read or understand the language. The complexities of Arabic prosody and the vast range of genres and expressions of the Arabic and Persian narrative and poetic corpus seem to preclude access to all but scholars. Workshop participants will explore means and ways to make this literature accessible beyond the specialist circle.
The joint workshops themselves will examine how stories, motifs, characters, images travel across borders and migrate into new host cultures, moving into different languages, different genres, and on to different registers.

B: The workshops also set out to investigate collaborative exploration and discussion for translation/literary recreation in itself. Can the workshop model be a stimulus to the making of fresh, vigorous reawakened material from unfamiliar contexts and languages the writer-translator does not always know? The group sessions will provide the scope to be innovative about participation and collaboration for literary creativity.
Translators of the writers taking part will be present to discuss their task. However the project differs from strict translation, as applies to the work of contemporary Arabic novelists. The workshops are focusing on canonical/ancient/medieval/traditional material and its varying expressions because in this era of hostility to cultures associated with Islam, it is more important than ever to explore the riches of their vast literature and to understand the mutual entanglement of literary traditions.
These workshops will continue the project Stories in Transit, which undertakes nourishing storytelling and creativity in refugee communities. The project began in Oxford in May 2016 and Palermo in September 2016 and May 2017, and is a collaboration between Birkbeck, the University of Palermo, and the NGO Bibliothèques sans Frontières.
The material will include songs and squibs by medieval women poets, romances from Persia, the lyric poetry in Tales of the 1001 Nights, animal and other fables from Solwan, or The Waters of Comfort by Ibn Zafer from Sicily, written in the l2th century, or materials participants themselves propose.
Participants will attend all four workshops at which the visiting speaker and translator will address a text or group of texts; a general discussion about them will follow, leading to a choice of subject to develop work on over the summer and a reunion in the autumn to review the fruits of the workshop.  These will not aim to give faithful versions of the originals, but transpose them, sometimes even into a different form – eg poem to drama, story to song – the reawaken them and communicate them to readers and audiences today.

18th May 2017
Birkbeck Arts Week 2017 Found in Translation – The Man Booker International Prize
Keynes Library, 43 Gordon Square, London
On the eve of the prize announcement join some of this year’s Man Booker International Finalists as they discuss the impact of translation and read from their novels in English and the original. The Man Booker International Prize, whose judges are chaired this year by Birkbeck’s Professor Marina Warner, rewards an author for an achievement in fiction. Open to authors from all over the world, either writing originally in English or published in translation. At this event top translator Shaun Whiteside leads a conversation with three finalists attending are Mia Couto, Alain Mabanckou and Marlene van Niekerk.In partnership with English PEN which this year celebrates 10 years of its writers in translation programme, a grant making programme which has recently given awards to Mia Couto and Alain Mabanckou.

13th May 2017
Marina has contributed a text to celebrate the opening of Ana Maria Pacheco’s exhibition Dispersing the Night at for Salisbury Cathedral from The Enchanted Garden of Ana Maria Pacheco in Ana Maria Pacheco, Norwich 2015, Pratt Contemporary, 2015, pp.15-19, Marina Warner @ 2015, which can be read here. More information about Ana Maria Pacheco’s exhibition Dispersing the Night exhibition at the Cathedral can be found here.

Marina’s introduction to Down Below by Leonora Carrington, (NYRB Classics 2017) discussed in Swimming under cemeteries by Lorna Scott Fox, published in The TLS, 5 May 2017, pp 3-5. The article can be found here.

5th May 2017
Marina contributed ‘Otherworldly Ties’, an essay review of What It Means to Fall from the Sky by Lesley Nneka Arimah, (Riverhead Books) published in The New York Times, 5th May 2017, the article can be read here.

5th-7th May 2017
Stories in Transit – Telling the Tale in Times of Conflict
Oratorio Santa Chiara, Ballarò, Palermo
Marina Warner – Birkbeck College, University of London, Valentina Castagna – Dipartimento di Scienze Umanistiche, University of Palermo, Giuseppina Sorce – Head of the CPIA, Palermo, Associazione Asante onlus, ex “Casa Marconi”, via Monfenera. 

The programme PDF can be downloaded here.

2nd May 2017 7pm
Talking about Leonora Carrington with Chloe Aridjis (writer and co-curator Leonora Carrington, Tate Liverpool 2015), Jennifer Higgie (editor, Frieze) and Marina Warner. As part of Cubitt Galery’s events series ‘Houses are really bodies: escape, defiance and friendship in the writing of Leonora Carrington’.

Marina Warner has contributed ‘Magical Aesthetics’ a catalogue essay for the Christian Thompson: Ritual intimacy (27 April – 8 July 2017) exhibition at Monash University Museum of Art, Australia.
Christian Thompson: Ritual intimacy will be the first survey exhibition of one of Australia’s leading Indigenous artists. Thompson, of the Bidjara people, works across photography, video, sculpture, performance and sound to explore notions of identity, race and Australia’s colonial history. He made history himself as one of  the first two Aboriginal Australians to be accepted into Oxford University, where he completed his Doctorate of Philosophy (Fine Art) in 2016.
Ritual intimacy will cover the breadth of Thompson’s practice, both in the media he employs and in the works he has made for Australian  and European contexts. It will include his best-known work in photography, where he has used his own image to present ideas about identity and the collision of cultures, along with his audio and video works that celebrate language and gesture through performance, sound and song.
More info here.

Once Upon a Time: A Short History of Fairy Tale by Marina Warner, review by Jeffrey Howard published in Marvels & Tales, Vol. 30, No. 2, Fall 2016. More info can be found here.

18th April 2017
Down Below by Leonora Carrington, introduction by Marina Warner, published by The New York Review of Books (NYRB Classics) pp vii-xxxvii.
More info can be found here.

April 2017
Lenses from Somewhere: A Memory of Ted Hughes by Marina Warner pp 67-74, published in The London Magazine.
More info can be found here.

6th April 2017
The Debutante and Other Stories by Leonora Carrington, with an introduction by Sheila Heti and an afterword by Marina Warner, published by Silver Press (2017), more info and events can be found here.

2nd April 2017
Marina interviewed in ‘Giselle: Belle of the Ballet’ for BBC Four. Tamara Rojo, dancer and artistic director of English National Ballet, explores Giselle – the first great Romantic ballet, and a defining role for any ballerina. The programme can be watched here.

1st April 2017
‘From high society to surrealism: in praise of Leonora Carrington – 100 years on’ With her paintings and tales based on dreams, animals and the occult, Carrington was an uncanny original. Marina Warner salutes the artist on her centenary, published in The Guardian Review, p18 here.

31st March 2017
Marina contributed ‘What do you want from an opposition’ to The New Statesman, 31 March-06 April 2017, pp 44-45.

13th March 2017 6pm
Marina Warner ‘The Flight of the Holy House: Nazareth – Loreto- Walsingham’ – The annual lecture of the Cambridge Italian Research Network
Tickets and more information can be found here.

9th March 2017 6.30pm
The British School at Rome
Artist’s talk by Pádraig Timoney – Felicity Powell lecture at British School at Rome
More info here.

23rd February 2017
Writer and mythologist Marina Warner presents the 2017 Prokhorov Lecture at The University of Sheffield
Best-selling novelist, short-story writer, and scholar Dame Marina Warner gave the second 2016-17 Annual Arts and Humanities Prokhorov Lecture on Thursday 23 February 2017. The video can be watched here.

14th February 2017 – 16th April 2017
ICA London
Marina featured in films on display as part of ‘ICA Video Library: 1981-1993’ an exhibition of work from the ICA Artists video archives on display at the ICA Fox Reading Room.
Between 1981 and 1993 the ICA’s Video Library offered public access to a unique collection of over 1000 tapes including Artists’ Videos, Documentaries and Independent Films, at a time when availability of these materials were rare and limited. This Fox Reading Room display explores the role of public access collections, taking the Library’s 1986 complete catalogue as a starting point to examine the Video Library, its relationship to the ICA’s ongoing Moving Image programmes and the evolving perception of Moving Image’s role in art galleries and institutions.
More information can be found here.

23rd February 2017
The Second 2016-17 Annual Arts and Humanities Prokhorov Lecture will be delivered by Marina Warner on the topic “At Home in Your Head: Stories in Times of Displacement”
Dame Marina Warner, best-selling novelist, short-story writer, and scholar is best-known for her work on feminism and myth. Her first book, The Dragon Empress (1972), offers both a study of the Empress Dowager Cixi, or Tz’u-hsi, and a fascinating portrait of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century China, while her second book, Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary (1976), which on its publication generated fierce international controversy, now counts as a standard work in feminist cultural criticism. Since then, she has published a large number of both fiction and non-fiction works, including From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers (1994) and Phantasmagoria: Spirit Visions, Metaphors, and Media into the Twenty-First Century (2006). Her many national and international prizes and honorary degrees include The Holberg Prize, the Commendatore dell’Ordine della Stella di Solidareità, the Aby Warburg Prize, and the Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.
More details can be found here.

16th January 2017
Marina Warner contributes’ At the Gogol Centre’ to the London Review of Books LRB Blog, can be read here.

6th January 2017
Marina Warner contributes ‘Intro: The Picture Posctard’ to Speaking Enchantment: Jack Zipes’ Picture Postcards.

5th January 2017
Marina Warner contributes ‘Anglo-Egyptian Attitudes’ to the London Review of Books pp17-20 Volume 39, Number 1 5th January 2017, more info here.
MW Note: The print of Admiral Walker’s daughter is differently coloured from the version I describe.

January 2017
Marina Warner contributes ‘Dreams of Enchantment – Kay Nielsen’s illustrations to Hansel and Gretel and Other Stories’ to the Folio Society limited edition ‘ Hansel and Gretel The Brothers Grimm’ Illustrated by Kay Nielsen, published by The Folio Society, limited to 980 copies. More info can be found here.