Dame Marina Sarah Warner, CH, DBE, FRSL, FBA (born 9 November 1946) is an English historian, mythographer, art critic, novelist and short story writer. 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, and Vogue.[1] She has been a visiting professor, given lectures and taught on the faculties of many universities.[2]
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,[3][4][5] and is now Professor of English and Creative Writing at Birkbeck, University of London.[6] In 2017, she was elected president of the Royal Society of Literature (RSL), the first time the role has been held by a woman since the founding of the RSL in 1820.[7][8][9] She has been a Distinguished Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, since 2019.[10]
In 2015, having received the prestigious Holberg Prize, Warner decided to use the award to start the Stories in Transit project, a series of workshops bringing international artists, writers and other creatives together with young migrants living in Palermo, Sicily.[11][12]
Biography
Marina Warner was born in London to an English father, Esmond Warner (died 1982), and Ilia (née Emilia Terzulli, died 2008), an Italian whom he had met during the Second World War in Bari, Apulia.[13] Her paternal grandfather was the cricketer Sir Pelham Warner.[14] She has one sister, Laura Gascoigne, who is an art critic.
In 1971, she married William Shawcross, with whom she has a son, the sculptor Conrad.[17] The couple divorced in 1980.[18] She was married to the painter Johnny Dewe Mathews from 1981 to 1997.[19] Her third husband is mathematician Graeme Segal.[13]
Warner has been identified as the "lady writer" of the Dire Straits song "Lady Writer" (1979), whom the singer sees on television "talking about the Virgin Mary" and who reminds him of his former lover.[20]
Her first book was The Dragon Empress: The Life and Times of Tz'u-hsi, Empress Dowager of China, 1835–1908 (1972), followed by the controversial Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary (1976), a provocative study of Roman Catholic veneration of the Virgin Mary. These were followed by Joan of Arc: The Image of Female Heroism (1981) and Monuments & Maidens: The Allegory of the Female Form (1985).[21]
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 (from ancient myth and folklore to modern obsessions), No Go the Bogeyman: On Scaring, Lulling, and Making Mock, was published in October 1998 and won the British Academy's Rose Mary Crawshay Prize in 2000. Warner's other novels include The Leto Bundle (2001) and Indigo (1992).[15] Her book Phantasmagoria (2006) 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.[22] 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.[23]
In March 2017, Warner was elected as the 19th—and first female—president of the Royal Society of Literature (RSL), succeeding Colin Thubron in the post.[8] On Warner's retirement from the role at the end of 2021, Bernardine Evaristo became the new president,[31] with Warner subsequently becoming RSL President Emerita.[32]
