Marina Warner
Forthcoming
Buy a copy from your local bookshop – perhaps Daunt books or another independent shop
Marina’s new book, Sanctuary: Ways of Telling, Ways of Dwelling is out! She has received some review, which you can read more about, alongside more on the book, on this page
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.
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:
Sanctuary is an ancient right. In the classical world, it offered immunity to fugitives from justice; in medieval Europe it extended a reprieve to all who sought it in a church or holy site. But what does sanctuary mean in today’s world? With the growth of nationalism and individualism, the concept has drifted away from a place of openness and welcome towards privacy: home as sanctuaries against strangers, migrants, incomers. Marina Warner navigates the principles that underpin the tradition of sanctuary and argues that storytelling offers a salve, a route to mutual understanding.
Monday 17 November 2025, Introduction of Riddles of the Sphinx, BFI Cinema, 8.30pm
Marina will be introducing this screening of Riddles of the Sphinx at the BFI on November 17th.
This dreamlike and meditative landmark of feminist cinema features an experimental narrative structure, a revolutionary visual style and hypnotic music.
This visually and narratively groundbreaking work, with music composed by Mike Ratledge, considers the experience of womanhood and motherhood in a patriarchal society. In the central story, Louise moves through a series of exemplary tableaux, as she negotiates her personal life and her relationship with her daughter, inside and outside the home. Mulvey and Wollen draw on their theoretical writings, exploring ideas through the prism of feminist theory and psychoanalysis. Also drawing on the influence of avant-garde film, they experiment with film language to disrupt and challenge conventions of cinematic spectatorship.
Fiction and the Fantastic: LRB Close Readings Podcast
Listen here to Marina’s introduction to the LRB’s Close Reading series. The first four are with the marvellous Anna Della Subin. Marina has since spoken with the brilliant Adam Thirlwell – see below and click on the images to go to each episode on its release. Last in the series, Marina is joined by Chloe Aridjis.
Episodes 1-4, with Anna Della Subin:
‘The Thousand and One Nights’
‘Gulliver’s Travels’ by Jonathan Swift
‘Invisible Cities’ by Italo Calvino
‘Alice in Wonderland’ by Lewis Carroll
Episodes 5-7 with Adam Thirlwell:
Stories by Franz Kafka
Tales by Jan Potocki and Isak Dinesen
James Hogg and Mikhail Bulgakov
‘Frankenstein’ by Mary Shelley
Episodes 9-14 with Chloe Aridjis
Stories by Jorge Luis Borges
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.
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.