2022

Thursday 10 February, 11:00 GMT, Arvon at Home Masterclass: Listening to Things – Workshop, with Sophie Herxheimer
£35 / £17.50 concession

In this two hour masterclass Sophie Herxheimer and Marina Warner will reflect on the vagaries of memory, the role of imagination and yes, invention, in meeting the past and re-animating it. We shall explore different keys to the doors of experience and tune into the surprising power of objects. We will watch as seeming trifles: Desdemona’s handkerchief, Aladdin’s lamp, Widow Wadham’s eyeglass in Tristram Shandy – act as pivots, moving story and characters into unforeseen worlds, pressing changes in the fates of all who touch them. And we will discover how the things around us too, whether ordinary or rare, seem to hold their own dialogue with us, despite their ostensible silence. We will write to find out what keys objects hold, to writing, to imagination, to the past and the future.

Find out more about Arvon, the UK’s home of creative writing, and book your place, here.

Monday 7 March, 12:30-1:20pm IST / 7-7:50am GMT, Marina Warner in conversation with Jenny Uglow, Jaipur Literature Festival

Marina will be discussing her book Inventory Of A Life Mislaid: An Unreliable Memoir with biographer, historian and publisher Jenny Uglow. The festival programme (5-14 March) is brimming with brilliant events, including Colm Tóibín in conversation with Tishani Doshi and Elif Shafak in conversation with Nandini Nair. Have a browse and book on to their physical/online festival via this link.

Thursday 31 March, 6.30pm, Joan of Arc, icon of feminism? at Historial Jeanne d’Arc, Rouen

Marina will be giving a talk on Joan of Arc for the museum dedicated to the historical figure, in Rouen, France. Marina will be talking about Joan of Arc in the context of feminism, asking whether the spirit of Joan of Arc, heroine of suffragists and suffragettes at the beginning of the 20th century, reappears in today’s young girls, leaders of global movements, such as Malala Yusufzai and Greta Thurnberg? Marina will take a look at the cult of Joan, promoted by the art of Sylvia Pankhurst in England and the sculpture of Joan Vaughn Hyatt Huntingdon in the United States, and will explore the cultural and psychological links between the feminist movement of the last century with the calls has the freedom of women and the protection of the environment made so passionately by the Johannine avatars of our days.

Explore the Historial Jeanne d’Arc here, where more information about Marina’s talk will be added in due course

The New York Review of Books have published Esmond and Ilia: An Unreliable Memoir, the American edition of Marina’s memoir Inventory of a Life Mislaid. The paperback book is out on May 24, 2022.