Fiction and the Fantastic: LRB Close Readings Podcast

Listen here to Marina’s introduction to the LRB’s upcoming Close Reading series – 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 first four episodes are with the marvellous Anna Della Subin. Later in the series, Marina will be joined by Adam Thirlwell and Chloe Aridjis.

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…!

Thursday 1 May, The Books That Made Me, 6.30-7.45pm, British Academy (10–11 Carlton House Terrace, London, SW1Y 5AH), Free (booking required)

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.

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.

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.

Marina Warner’s latest work, Sanctuary: The Shelter of Stories (working title), 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.