Marina Warner


Dame Marina Sarah Warner, is an English novelist, short story writer, historian and mythographer. She is known for her many non-fiction books relating to feminism and myth. She has written for many publications, including The London Review of Books, the New Statesman, Sunday Times, The Daily Telegraph and Vogue. She has been a visiting professor, given lectures and taught on the faculties of many universities.
She resigned from her position as Professor in the Department of Literature, Film and Theatre Studies at the University of Essex in 2014, sharply criticising moves towards "for-profit business model" universities in the UK, and is now Professor of English and Creative Writing at Birkbeck, University of London. In 2017 she was elected president of the Royal Society of Literature, the first time the role has been held by a woman since the founding of the RSL in 1820.

Early life

Marina Warner was born in London to an English father and Italian mother. Her paternal grandfather was the English cricketer Sir Pelham Warner. She was brought up in Cairo, Brussels and in Berkshire, England, where she studied at St Mary's School, Ascot. She studied French and Italian at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford. While at Oxford she was the editor of Isis: a magazine for Oxford University.. She is a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. In 1971, she married William Shawcross, with whom she had a son, Conrad. The couple divorced in 1980.
Marina Warner is the titular "lady writer" of the Dire Straits song of that name, whom the singer sees on television "talking about the Virgin Mary" and reminds him of his former lover.

Career

Her first book was The Dragon Empress: The Life and Times of Tz'u-hsi, Empress Dowager of China, 1835–1908, followed by the controversial Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary, a provocative study of Roman Catholic veneration of the Virgin Mary. These were followed by Joan of Arc: The Image of Female Heroism and Monuments & Maidens: The Allegory of the Female Form.
Warner's novel The Lost Father was on the Booker Prize shortlist in 1988. Her non-fiction book From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers won a Mythopoeic Award in 1996. The companion study of the male terror figure, No Go the Bogeyman: On Scaring, Lulling, and Making Mock, was published in 2000 and won the British Academy's Rose Mary Crawshay Prize that year. Warner's other novels include The Leto Bundle and Indigo. Her book Phantasmagoria traces the ways in which "the spirit" has been represented across different mediums, from waxworks to cinema.
In December 2012, she presented a programme on BBC Radio Four about the Brothers Grimm.
She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1984. In 1994 she became only the second woman to deliver the BBC's Reith Lectures, published as Managing Monsters: Six Myths of Our Time, in which she gave an analysis of the workings of myth in contemporary society, with emphasis on politics and entertainment.
Warner received an honorary doctorate from the University of Oxford on 21 June 2006, and also holds honorary degrees from the universities of Exeter, York and St Andrews, and honorary doctorates from Sheffield Hallam University, the University of North London, the Tavistock Institute, Oxford University, the Royal College of Art, University of Kent, the University of Leicester, and King's College London.
She was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire in the 2008 Queen's Birthday Honours for services to literature.
She was a professor in the Department of Literature, Film and Theatre Studies at the University of Essex from 2004 until her resignation in 2014. She took up a chair in English and Creative Writing at Birkbeck College, University of London, in September 2014. She is a quondam fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, and was chair of the judges of the Man Booker International Prize 2015.
Warner was made a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in the 2015 New Year Honours for services to higher education and literary scholarship.
In 2015–16, she was the Weidenfeld Visiting Professor of European Comparative Literature in St Anne's College, Oxford.
In March 2017, Marina Warner was elected as the Royal Society of Literature's 19th – and first female – president, succeeding Colin Thubron in the post.

Honours and awards

Four-part interview conducted by .
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Footnotes