Marina Warner
2025
Fiction and the Fantastic: LRB Close Readings Podcast
Listen here to Marina’s introduction to the LRB’s upcoming Close Reading series. The first four episodes were with the marvellous Anna Della Subin: the first episode (on ‘The Thousand and One Nights’) aired on Monday 13th January; the second episode (on ‘Gulliver’s Travels’ by Jonathan Swift) came out on February 10th; the third (on ‘Invisible Cities’ by Italo Calvino) on March 10th, the fourth on April 7th (on ‘Alice in Wonderland’ by Lewis Carroll).
‘The Thousand and One Nights’
‘Gulliver’s Travels’ by Jonathan Swift
‘Invisible Cities’ by Italo Calvino
‘Alice in Wonderland’ by Lewis Carroll
Next in the series, Marina has been discussing works with Adam Thirlwell – the fifth episode was shared on May 5th (discussing Franz Kafka), the sixth on June 2nd (Jan Potocki and Isak Dinesen), seventh July 2nd (James Hogg and Mikhail Bulgakov) and eighth on 28th July (‘Frankenstein’ by Mary Shelley):
Stories by Franz Kafka
Tales by Jan Potocki and Isak Dinesen
James Hogg and Mikhail Bulgakov
‘Frankenstein’ by Mary Shelley
The final four episodes are in conversation with Chloe Aridjis. The ninth recording aired on 25 August and features Marina and Chloe speaking about Jorge Luis Borges. The next is on Leonora Carrington’s The Hearing Trumpet. October’s offering is on J.G. Ballard and Angela Carter.
Stories by Jorge Luis Borges
‘The Hearing Trumpet’ by Leonora Carrington
J.G. Ballard and Angela Carter
Friday 7 February, In Conversation: Rachel Kneebone and Marina Warner at the Fitzrovia Chapel, Roberts Institute of Art, 7-8pm, More here!
Join us for a lively discussion between exhibition artist Rachel Kneebone and celebrated author Marina Warner exploring how the key themes of In Attendance: Paying Attention in a Fragile World at the Fitzrovia Chapel connect to Kneebone’s and Warner’s practices.
From Kneebone’s intricate process of working with porcelain to Warner’s insights on the power of storytelling, this conversation offers a chance to delve deeper into the ideas behind the artworks and the exhibition.
There will also be the opportunity to hear Marina talk about a short story she wrote in response to Paula Rego’s drawing in the exhibition. The conversation will be chaired by RIA curator, Yates Norton.
This is one of three events taking place alongside the exhibition. You can also join us for a Panel Discussion on The Politics and Poetics of Attention (23 January) and an Evening of Music with Violinist Angharad Davies (30 January).
Linder: Danger Came Smiling, Exhibition at the Hayward Gallery, 11 Feb – 5 May 2025
Marina has contributed to the exhibition catalogue for Linder: Danger Came Smiling, the first London retrospective of Linder’s work. The exhibition ‘showcases 50 years of the pioneering feminist artist’s work, dissecting our fascination with the body and its representation’. Marina will be joining Linder in an in-conversation event at the Southbank Centre at 7pm on 14 February (see above)
From the early photomontages made while she was part of the punk scene of 1970s Manchester, to new work in digital montage shown for the first time, the exhibition presents the breadth of Linder’s artistic output across montage, photography, performance and sculpture.
The body and its photographic representation, from early glamour photography to digital deep fakes, is central to Linder’s approach to image-making.
Often working with a medical grade scalpel, she draws on the creative and violent power of the cut in her forensic examination of our shifting attitudes to aspirational lifestyles, sex, food and fashion.
As featured in must-see exhibition round-ups in The Guardian, The Art Newspaper and Dazed.
An adapted version of Linder: Danger Came Smiling, curated by Hayward Gallery Touring, tours nationally to Inverleith House, Royal Botanic Gardens, Edinburgh; Glynn Vivian Art Gallery, Swansea; and Grundy Art Gallery, Blackpool in 2025 – 2026.
Linder in Conversation with Marina Warner, Friday 14 February, 7pm, Purcell Room at Queen Elizabeth Hall (Tickets from £10)
From Linder’s involvement in Manchester’s punk scene to her mantic stains inspired by British Surrealist Ithell Colquhoun, she is one of the foremost feminist artists of her generation.
In this discussion, Linder and Warner explore gender, the body and consumer culture’s influences, and the surreal and mythological realms which are a great source of inspiration for them both.
Linder is known for her photography, radical feminist photomontage and confrontational performance art. She focuses on questions of gender, commodity and display. Her photomontage practice combines everyday images from domestic and fashion magazines with pornography and archive material.
More information here!
Folklore Reimagined Late: Living Almanac Workshop, with Sophie Herxheimer, British Academy, Thursday 10 April 2025 (two workshop sessions, from 6pm)
Almanacs were the most popular form of printed publication for centuries. A Living Almanac will gather us all kinds of lore that is important for us now and in the near future. Days can be marked by such lore as local weather, tides, migrations of birds and other creatures, dates propitious for planting, important days such as birthdays. Fantastical and prophetic material is also typical of an almanac – horoscopes, wonders, miracles, superstitions, the folkloric and the surreal.
You will be invited to bring anecdotes, proverbs, old wives’ tales, special commemorations, poems, songs, photographs, drawings, and other material to inspire the Living Almanac. You will also be reaching beyond what has occurred to what might happen and what could be brought about – fostered or prevented.
Please note that this will be a group workshop that requires communication and collaboration with other attendees.
This workshop has a maximum capacity of 24 people and must be booked in advance. If you can no longer attend, please let us know so that we can offer your spot to someone else.
The Almanac workshop is part of the BA’s one-night spring festival of sorts, ‘Folklore Reimagined’ – an evening of inspiring talks, screenings, workshops, exhibitions and performances to explore how traditional beliefs and stories have evolved to shape global identities throughout history, and continue to influence culture and inspire new generations today. Tickets here are for the whole evening, but there are also tickets specifically to join for the workshop session with Marina and Sophie. The first session has sold out – a second batch of tickets for a later will be released soon! There may be space on the night to join as well, so do feel free to come along and see…!
April 18, 2025: ‘Mysteries and grace: The beauty and humanity of fourteenth-century Sienese art‘, Review of National Gallery exhibition – Siena: The Rise of Painting, TLS Issue No. 6368
‘Marina Warner in Conversation with Tacita Dean’ (2006), chapter in MIT Press’ publication Tacita Dean, edited by George Baker and Annie Rana (pp.57-83)
Thursday 1 May, ‘The Books That Made Me’, 6.30-7.45pm, British Academy (10–11 Carlton House Terrace, London, SW1Y 5AH)
Join Marina as she discusses the most meaningful stories from the realm of myth, folklore and fairy tale, that have shaped and inspired her life and work. Find out more here.
The conversation with Ritula Shah is available to watch back on the BA YouTube page:
May 8, 2025: Inside the Cauldron: Film Screening, Birkbeck Arts Week, 3.30-5pm
Marina will introduce the work of Leonora Carrington before a screening of Inside the Cauldron, a short film inspired by Carrington’s artwork and an unpublished essay of hers. The film was co-created by Sophie Mei Birkin and India Ayles, and produced by Robyn Jakeman at the Derek Jarman Lab (Birkbeck).
Film Description: A recently discovered ecological essay by the pioneering Surrealist artist Leonora Carrington has resurfaced in a world grappling with the environmental collapse she feared. In response to her urgent message, a group of emerging artists from the UK and Mexico created ‘Inside the Cauldron’, an experimental film that brings her vision to life.
Produced by the Derek Jarman Lab and filmed inside Carrington’s previously unseen home and studio in Mexico City, ‘Inside the Cauldron’ offers a rare glimpse into her world—one that celebrates hybridity and dissolves the boundaries between human and animal.
May 13, 2025: A summons to history: Radwa Ashour’s Andalusia and its afterlife, Brunei Gallery, SOAS, 6pm
Marina will join this in-conversation event, alongside Karoline Cook and Tamim al-Barghouti, to celebrate the first English translation of Radwa Ashour’s Granada trilogy, by Kay Heikkinen.
May 15-16th, 2025: Understanding Ovidian Violence and Beyond, Ghent University, Belvedère, Keynote talk 15 May – ‘Shapeshifting: A Strategy of Resistance?’
Marina will be taking part in the international conference Understanding Ovidian Violence and Beyond,taking place in Ghent, 15-16 May 2025. More information will be shared in due course.
June 1st, 2025, knack: ‘Cultuurhistorica Marina Warner: ‘Trump is een ogre en die versla je niet met brute kracht, maar door slim te zijn’ ‘/ ‘Cultural historian Marina Warner: ‘Trump is an ogre and you don’t defeat him with brute force, but by being smart‘ ‘
© Thomas Nolf
Elisa Hulstaert interviewed Marina for knack magazine whilst she was in Ghent, where they spoke about politics and storytelling and the democratisation of art.
June 13, 2025: Maps of home: Imagining sanctuary now (College of Sanctuary Lecture), Mansfield College, Oxford, 5.30-6.30pm
Acclaimed historian, mythographer, art critic and novelist Marina Warner reflects on the idea of home, and how we can imagine sanctuary today.
This biennial lecture highlights Mansfield College’s status as a College of Sanctuary under the UK Universities of Sanctuary scheme. Learn more about this here.
Register to attend here
June 16 2025: Migrant Forms: Creative Futures, 9 – 7.30pm, Cripps Building (Auditorium and Foyer), Magdalene College, Cambridge
June 17, 2025: ‘Sanctuary by Marina Warner review – the power of stories in an age of migration’, The Guardian, Kathryn Hughes
Read the first review of Marina’s upcoming book Sanctuary: Ways of Telling, Ways of Dwelling. Kathryn Hughes writes for The Guardian that the book is ‘dazzlingly protean’ and ‘exquisitely attuned’. Sanctuary is out on 3 July! There’s more about the new book over on this page. The review was in print in the Guardian’s Saturday magazine on 21 July 2025:
June 21 2025:
Essex Book Festival: Dante’s Purgatorio – Philip Terry in conversation with Marina Warner, 1pm, St Leonard-at-the-Hythe Church, Hythe Hill Colchester,Essex
A sequel to Dante’s Inferno, which set Dante at the University of Essex, Dante’s Purgatorio relocates to Mersea Island, where a mountain is constructed out of Flexible Rock Substitute (FRS).
‘This new reworking of Dante’s masterpiece is remarkable: for boldness, resourceful inventiveness, and…for its emotional and moral heft.’ – Ralph Pite
English historian, mythographer, and author of Inventory of A Life Mislaid, Marina Warner will discuss her latest book about sanctuary: what it means for people in desperate situations today, and what refuge and displacement has meant for people throughout history, and the canons of literature and myth.
This event is part of an afternoon exploring Spirits, Salons and Sanctuary in the church of St Leonards through new books by poet and translator Philip Terry, poet and novelist Clare Pollard and cultural historian, mythographer and writer Marina Warner. These events are kindly supported by The Bean Trust.
June 2025
Marina is featured in the comprehensive English literature: From Romanticism to the present (Milan: Mondadori, 2025), by Rocco Coronato (pp.399-400). The entry detailing her work is in very good company, next to a profile on Angela Carter.
Marina contributed to the latest ‘Late Spring’ issue of Raritan with her piece ‘The Map Is Not the Territory’, Vol.XLIV, No 4.2 (pp.51-69).
Marina’s article on Versia Harris and her memorial artwork to Hugh Springer – ‘Versia Harris’s memorial to Hugh Springer: a response to Black Lives Matter protests at All Souls College’ – is part of the Burlington Contemporary June 2025 Journal Issue 12, online here.
TLS – Summer Books 2025
Alongside Margaret Drabble, A. E. Stallings, Frances Wilson, Paul Muldoon and a whole host of other TLS writers (24 in total), Marina has offered up some book recommendations for the summer. The piece appeared in No. 6377, the 20 June 2025 Issue. It is on their blog, too.
Here is a snippet from her contribution: ‘I am looking forward to reading Life Cycle of a Moth (Canongate), an experimental, eco-poetical novel by Rowe Irvin – I first heard of her because she is also an artist, and has found inspiration in the imaginary animals of Leonora Carrington […]’.
29th June – ‘On my radar’,The Observer
Read online here!
29th June – Scotland on Sunday, Stuart Kelly
‘ingenious and meticulous’; Stories in Transit ‘might seem modest, but given how shrill and vituperative the voices ranged against displaced people are it seems all the more necessary’; ‘Part of the exhilaration of reading any work by Warner is the breadth of reference. It is the opposite of dilettantism, a purposeful, sharp stitching’ – Stuart Kelly Review, The Scotsman: Scotland on Sunday
1 July – Literary Review, Rowan Williams
‘[Sanctuary] documents a tight web of practices and ideals without which any culture is not only impoverished but also seriously damaged. Warner’s complex, cumulative engagement with the topic becomes itself a kind of migrant journey to whose rhythms the reader has to surrender.’; ‘The chapters on the ways in which stories create and re-create maps for our journeys through life are tantalising. They feel like short books in themselves, full of insights that demand long pondering.’; ‘This is a deeply engaging book, learned and sensitive, original, spare and strange.’ – Rowan Williams, ‘Scattered Stories’, Review for Literary Review July 2025
5 July – Daily Telegraph, Rupert Christiansen
‘Sanctuary is without a doubt an imaginative and meticulous work of scholarship, underpinned by Warner’s passionately sincere commitment to the issues she raises.’; ‘rich food for thought’ – Rupert Christiansen, ‘The history of sanctuary is no safe haven’, The Daily Telegraph – Saturday
July 9 2025: LRB event – Marina in conversation with James Butler, 7pm, London Review Bookshop, 14 Bury Pl London WC1A 2JL, Tickets: £10 (SOLD OUT)
Marina discusses her new book on the ancient right of sanctuary and its meaning in the modern world with James Butler at the London Review Bookshop (14 Bury Pl London WC1A 2JL) at 7pm on 9 July 2025. Book here!
July 10 2025: Refugee Tales 2025: Festival of Walking, Panel Discussion – What Are the Longterm Impacts of Detention? William Patten School, Stoke Newington, Join the walk to attend!
Enchanting Wor(l)ds: The Works of Marina Warner, Friday 11 July 2025, Centre for Comparative Literature (Goldsmiths) Room 349, Senate House, Malet Street, London, WC1E 7HU
Marina Warner’s latest work, Sanctuary: Ways of Telling, Ways of Dwelling, the publication of which will coincide with our conference, opens with a scene from a film, where a man being chased finds refuge in a cathedral. Marina Warner describes how, as he lifts the giant door knocker, it becomes a hinge between danger and safety, enveloping the suppliant in a protective halo and becoming a portal to the Church’s ancient rite of, and right to, sanctuary. Enchanting Wor(l)ds will examine the myriad ways in which Marina Warner has dedicated her career to analysing how objects, spaces, temporalities, people, worlds and words can become enchanted: how they might be imbued with power, aura, mystery or dread.
Deriving from the Old French encantement, enchantment denotes a magical spell. In the account of her parents’ lives, Inventory of a Life Mislaid: An Unreliable Memoir (2021), a pair of brogue shoes purchased by Marina Warner’s English father for her young Italian mother when she first moved to the UK, becomes ‘proof of membership, a swipe card, a badge which gained her entrance to a certain way of life’. Like Cinderella’s glass slippers the brogues are a charmed gift, transforming its wearer. Indeed, one of the world’s leading specialists in fairy tales, myths and legends, illustrated most comprehensively in From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and their Tellers (1994) and Stranger Magic: Charmed States and the Arabian Nights (2011), Marina Warner examines the vital role played by magic in imagining alternative possibilities. The enduring power of myths, legends and fairy tales to spellbind us is elaborated in Six Myths of Our Time (the Reith Lectures, 1994), where Marina Warner enlists angels, monsters and beasts to expose the fault lines of masculinity, maternity, childhood, race and other phenomena central to our daily lives.
Enchantment can be summoned to allay fears. In No Go the Bogeyman: Scaring, Lulling and Making Mock (1998) the power to terrify us possessed by ogres, giants, monsters and lords of the underworld is placed under Marina Warner’s clear-eyed investigation. Here, as in Phantasmagoria: Spirit Visions, Metaphors, and Media into the Twenty-first Century (2006), Warner asks why ghouls and ghosts and the supernatural world of fairies, spirits, phantasms and zombies exercise such fascination, given that since the Enlightenment, Europe has presented itself as grounded in rational science, rather than in a belief. Undeniably, postcolonial critique runs throughout much of Warner’s works, the uses of the supernatural in the Caribbean appearing, for instance, in Fantastic Metamorphoses, Other Worlds (2002), where the magical powers of transformation, metamorphosis and mutation –recurring concerns in Warner’s work – symbolize the protean, fluid nature of all identity.
Nothing is intrinsically enchanting. We understand the word here both as an adjective, and as a gerund: a verb, a capacity, a desire to imbue something with a special power. As Marina Warner has examined across her career, most notably in Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary (1976) and Monuments and Maidens (1996), the female form has been subjected to enchantment, whether it is sexualized, demonized or sanctified, perhaps more than any other entity in human history.
Throughout, Marina Warner’s interest in art sustains her enquiries, and she has contributed to the exhibition catalogues of many artists including Kiki Smith, Paula Rego, and most recently Linder (collected in Forms of Enchantment, 2018; and Myths, Magic and Marvels, 2026).
Going further back into its etymology, enchantment derives from the Latin in+cantare, meaning to put into song. Whether in her brilliant disquisitions, elaborated over scores of monographs and articles – for the London Review of Books, New York Review of Books, The Guardian and, at the beginning of her career, Vogue – or in her novels and short stories (In a Dark Wood, 1977; The Skating Party, 1982; The Lost Father, 1988; Indigo, 1992; The Leto Bundle, 2001) Marina Warner enchants the page, making her prose vibrate, her words hum.
Finally, a mere glance at the numerous photographs of Marina Warner held in the National Portrait Gallery collection reveals the entrancing mise en scène with which she has been represented. In a portrait by Mayotte Magnus (1977), taken a few years after the publication of The Dragon Empress: Life and Times of Tz’u-Hsi, 1835-1908, Empress Dowager of China (1972) the model, in a smock dress embellished with appliqué, and adorned with one of her hallmark ornate necklaces, is flanked by two Chinese figurines as she leans against intricate floral wallpaper. For over five decades Marina Warner has enchanted readers and listeners with her ability both to lift the veil on sorcery and spin, and to reveal our potential wondrously to transform our world for the better.
We are delighted that Marina Warner will be ‘in conversation’ at the conference; and that the keynote address will be delivered by Philip Terry, author of many creative works including Dante’s Inferno (2014), tapestry (2013, shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize) and Dante’s Purgatorio (2024), and Marina Warner’s long-time colleague, interlocutor and friend.
The conference will be in person.
For any inquiries, please contact the organisers, Lucia Boldrini, Marie-Claude Canova-Green, Clare Finburgh Delijani and Isobel Hurst at CCL@gold.ac.uk. Please include the words “Enchanted World(l)ds” in the subject line.
Register to attend here
July 11 2025: ‘A Place of One’s Own – Marina Warner on how we forgot the meaning of sanctuary’, Financial Times Weekend (summer arts special)
Read online or below Kitty Grady’s interview with Marina for the FT Weekend magazine, where they discuss Sanctuary
July 15, 2025, Talk for The Folk Society, ‘How to Create Sanctuary Now?’, 19:00 BST, tickets £6.00 (£4 for members with promo code)
Get your tickets here!
Marina wrote for The Tablet about Sanctuary – see here.
The article is online here.
July 20th, 2025, ‘Safe from Harm’, Alex Preston, The Observer, read here.
Alex Preston reviewed Sanctuary: Ways of Telling, Ways of Dwelling for The Observer, which he writes is a ‘dazzling meditation on the idea of home, hospitality and refuge’. Preston also writes: ‘The pleasure of the book is following the chains of ideas Warner links together, as she riffs on associations so loose you fear she might have wandered from the path altogether, only to return to her central thesis. She leaps from high culture to low, literature to visual art, deep time to the present.’
July 23 + 25, 2025, Book Post (Parts 1 + 2) ‘Diary: Marina Warner on “The Books That Made Me”
As part of the project, “Folkore Reimagined,” the British Academy asked Marina Warner to join their “Books That Made Me” series by selecting some books that have shaped her life and work and talking about them with broadcaster Ritula Shah.
These two pieces (Parts I and II) for Book Post are adapted from their conversation.
July 29th, 2025, Breaking Down Patriarchy: ‘Episode 30: Revisiting the Virgin Mary – with mythographer Marina Warner’
Amy Allebest is joined by Dr. Marina Warner to revisit her book, Alone of All Her Sex, getting expert insight into the history of the Virgin Mary, her evolution and multitude of meanings, unrealistic religious standards, and what it takes for a woman to become a myth.
Revisiting the Virgin Mary
Listen here!
8 August 2025, Church Times ‘Book review: Sanctuary: Ways of telling, ways of dwelling by Marina Warner’, Katherine Harvey, online and available here.
Harvey writes that Marina, in particular her work on Stories in Transit, ‘offer a glimmer of hope in our increasingly unsettled world’.
August 21, 2025, Author’s Club Lunch event, 12.30pm, National Liberal Club, 1 Whitehall Place, London SW1A 2HE
What does sanctuary mean today? Drawing on a lifetime of engagement with literature, myth, history and tradition from different cultures, Marina Warner’s Sanctuary is an ambitious attempt to grapple with the sharpest questions that we are facing in today’s world of global turmoil.
More information here.
August 22, 2025, TLS (No.6386) Review of Sanctuary by Alberto Manguel
Marina’s book Sanctuary: Ways of Telling, Ways of Dwelling was reviewed in the 22 Aug issue of the TLS, in a piece titled ‘Refuge, lair and inner sanctum: A history and study of the concept of sanctuary’, by Alberto Manguel. He writes: ‘she is rigorous in her research and punctilious in her bibliographical backing […] there is a playful Ariel behind her scholarly Prospero’; ‘Warner weaves her argument by passing seamlessly from Gilgamesh to video performances, from Kalīla and Dimna to Harry Potter, and somehow it all makes sense, even if sometimes the point of the story is just the story.’ ; ‘Sanctuary is an enlightening gift’.
August-September 2025
Rory Stewart: The Long History of… Heroism (Episodes 1-5), BBC Radio 4
Marina was interviewed by Rory Stewart for his new series for the BBC, where she appears across the course of the series, speaking about heroism. Listen here.
Marina wrote a short piece about the ever-delightful magic of Lotte Reiniger’s papercut films, specifically The Adventures of Prince Achmed, which will be one of the pieces included in The Shelter of Stories at Compton Verney this autumn and winter.
You can find the writing in the most recent Autumn 2025 issue of the Royal Academy magazine, or here:
5 September 2025
Season 15, Episode 53 of the How To Academy podcast
Marina spoke with Nicole Wong in an episode, titled ‘Marina Warner – Reimagining Sanctuary for a World in Crisis’. It is available to listen to here.
9 September 2025, Marina Warner: ‘I wouldn’t dare write Indigo now’, Prospect Magazine
Franklin Nelson visited Marina and wrote a short piece about her, Sanctuary and the upcoming exhibition The Shelter of Stories,coming soon to Compton Verney. Read the article here.
23 September 2025, ‘Christopher Clark & Marina Warner: A Scandal in Königsberg’, 7pm @ London Review of Books, [Sold Out]
Historian Christopher Clark discusses his latest book, A Scandal in Königsberg (London: Allen Lane, 2025) with Marina Warner at the London Review Bookshop.
Our preeminent historian of Germany turns, in A Scandal in Königsberg, to an intriguing sequence of events that has fascinated for many years. In 1830 Königsberg, now the Russian Baltic enclave of Kaliningrad, was a somewhat sleepy backwater, famous mainly for having once been the home of the philosopher Immanuel Kant. But its tranquility was shattered by a religious scandal, implying that beneath the town’s somnolent surface there were dark erotic currents and wrenching betrayals of trust. Clark’s deft treatment of the material, combining erudition and humour, makes this forgotten piece of history very much a tale for our times.
17 October 2025, Swedenborg Hall (The Swedenborg Society, 20-21 Bloomsbury Way, London, WC1A 2TH) ‘Close Readings Live: Fiction and the Fantastic: Fiction and the Fantastic – Marina Warner | Adam Thirlwell | Edwin Frank’, 7pm – 8.30pm, doors open at 6.30pm. Tickets here.
Close Readings is the podcast subscription from the London Review of Books, in which longstanding contributors explore a literary period or theme through a selection of key works. In one of this year’s series, the writer and mythographer Marina Warner traversed the great parallel tradition of the literature of astonishment and wonder, from the 1001 Nights to Ursula K. Le Guin, in conversation with Anna Della Subin, Adam Thirlwell and Chloe Aridjis.
Over twelve episodes, the tapestry Marina and her interlocutors wove was inevitably patchy in places and completely blank in others; the implicit canon of the fantastic could only ever be a partial one. This event, the first of its kind attempted (but perhaps it will become a Close Readings/Swedenborg tradition) is an attempt to fill in all the gaps, live! Marina, Adam and special guest Edwin Frank, editorial director of New York Review Books and author of Stranger than Fiction: Lives of the Twentieth-Century Novel will assemble a complete taxonomy of the genre over 75 minutes, or fail heroically, either way completing the series in the process. The recording will be released as the thirteenth episode of the podcast at the end of the year.
23 October 2025, ‘That’s all folk: Marina Warner, the curator and mythographer creating a space for stories’, The Guardian, Skye Sherwin
Marina was interviewed for The Guardian by Skye Sherwin – the piece about The Shelter of Stories, open at Compton Verney until 22 February 2026, is available to read online. Marina speaks about the overall exhibition, along with highlights from a small selection of works on display. Read the full article here.
Helen Chadwick: Life Pleasures, Exhibition at the Hepworth Wakefield, 17 May – 27 October 2025
Marina has contributed to the exhibition catalogue for the upcoming exhibition of Helen Chadwick’s work at the Hepworth Wakefield. A recent work by Marina also related to Chadwick may be of interest to those visiting the exhibition – Helen Chadwick: The Oval Court
This major retrospective will be the first in over 25 years, and will chart the development of Chadwick’s art from her renowned degree show piece In the Kitchen (1977) through to her Piss Flowers (1991–2).
Chadwick’s experiments across mediums were innovative and unconventional; typically combining aesthetic beauty with an alliance of unusual, often grotesque materials. She consistently expressed a feminist perspective steeped in humour, and employed a vast range of materials in unexpected ways, incorporating bodily fluids, meat, flowers, chocolate and compost into her works. Through her skilled use of traditional fabrication methods and sophisticated technologies, she quickly established herself as a leading figure amongst Britain’s post-war avant-garde, becoming one of the first women artists to be nominated for the Turner Prize in 1987.
The exhibition will highlight Chadwick’s significant impact and contributions to British and international art history by demonstrating her relevance to contemporary feminist concerns, her evolution of material culture and her consistently playful approach.