Marina Warner

Last updated


Marina Warner

HiResMarinaWarner2PhotoCreditCarolinamazzolaricropped.jpg
Warner in 2017
BornMarina Sarah Warner
(1946-11-09) 9 November 1946 (age 77)
Paddington, Middlesex, England
OccupationHistorian, mythographer, novelist, lecturer, professor
Alma mater Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford
Notable awards Mythopoeic Award
Rose Mary Crawshay Prize
National Book Critics Circle Award (Criticism)
Holberg Prize
British Academy Medal
Spouse
(m. 1971;div. 1980)

Johnny Dewe Mathews
(m. 1981;div. 1997)

Graeme Segal
Website
marinawarner.com

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]

Contents

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.

Marina was brought up initially in Cairo, where her father ran a bookshop, until it was set on fire during attacks on foreign businesses in January 1952, a precursor to the Egyptian revolution. [13] The family then moved to Brussels and to Cambridge and Berkshire, England, where Marina studied at St Mary's School, Ascot. She studied French and Italian at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford. [15] While at Oxford she was the editor of The Isis magazine (published by Robert Maxwell). [16]

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]

Career

Illustration from
No Go the Bogeyman Warner Mole Illustration.jpg
Illustration from
No Go the Bogeyman

Warner began her career as a staff writer for The Daily Telegraph , before working as Vogue's features editor from 1969 until 1972. [12]

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]

Warner received an honorary doctorate (DLitt) from the University of Oxford on 21 June 2006, and also holds honorary degrees from the universities of Exeter (1995), York (1997) and St Andrews (1998), and honorary doctorates from Sheffield Hallam University (1995), the University of North London (1997), the Tavistock Institute (University of East London; 1999), Oxford University (2002), the Royal College of Art (2004), University of Kent (2005), the University of Leicester (2006), and King's College London (2009). [15] [24]

She was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 2008 Queen's Birthday Honours for services to literature. [25]

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. [26] 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. [27]

Warner was appointed Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE) in the 2015 New Year Honours for services to higher education and literary scholarship. [28] [29]

In 2015–16, she was the Weidenfeld Visiting Professor of European Comparative Literature in St Anne's College, Oxford, part of the Humanitas Programme. [30]

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]

In 2019, Warner chaired the judges of the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature. [33] [34]

She was appointed Member of the Order of the Companions of Honour (CH) in the 2022 Birthday Honours for services to the humanities. [35]

Honours and awards

Publications

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">A. S. Byatt</span> British writer (1936–2023)

Dame Antonia Susan Duffy, known professionally by her former married name, A. S. Byatt, was an English critic, novelist, poet and short story writer. Her books have been translated into more than thirty languages.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Antony Beevor</span> English military historian (born 1946)

Sir Antony James Beevor, is a British military historian. He has published several popular historical works, mainly on the Second World War, the Spanish Civil War, and most recently the Russian Revolution and Civil War.

Anita Desai, born Anita Mazumdar, is an Indian novelist and the Emerita John E. Burchard Professor of Humanities at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. As a writer she has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize three times. She received a Sahitya Akademi Award in 1978 for her novel Fire on the Mountain, from the Sahitya Akademi, India's National Academy of Letters. She won the British Guardian Prize for The Village by the Sea (1983). Her other works include The Peacock, Voices in the City, Fire on the Mountain and an anthology of short stories, Games at Twilight. She is on the advisory board of the Lalit Kala Akademi and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, London.

Dame Hermione Lee, is a British biographer, literary critic and academic. She is a former President of Wolfson College, Oxford, and a former Goldsmiths' Professor of English Literature in the University of Oxford and Professorial Fellow of New College. She is a Fellow of the British Academy and of the Royal Society of Literature.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Blake Morrison</span> English poet and author (born 1950)

Philip Blake Morrison FRSL is an English poet and author who has published in a wide range of fiction and non-fiction genres. His greatest success came with the publication of his memoirs And When Did You Last See Your Father? (1993), which won the J. R. Ackerley Prize for Autobiography. He has also written a study of the murder of James Bulger, As If. Since 2003, Morrison has been Professor of Creative and Life Writing at Goldsmiths College, University of London. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Colin Thubron</span> British travel writer and novelist

Colin Gerald Dryden Thubron, FRAS is a British travel writer and novelist. In 2008, The Times ranked him among the 50 greatest postwar British writers. He is a contributor to The New York Review of Books, The Times, The Times Literary Supplement and The New York Times. His books have been translated into more than twenty languages. Thubron was appointed a CBE in the 2007 New Year Honours. He is a Fellow and, between 2009 and 2017, was President of the Royal Society of Literature.

Malise Walter Maitland Knox Hore-Ruthven is an Anglo-Irish academic and writer.

Fred D'Aguiar is a British-Guyanese poet, novelist, and playwright of Portuguese descent. He is currently Professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).

Stella Tillyard FRSL is an English author and historian, educated at Oxford and Harvard Universities and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. In 1999 her bestselling book Aristocrats was made into a six-part series for BBC1/Masterpiece Theatre sold to over 20 countries. Winner of the Meilleur Livre Étranger, the Longman/History Today Prize and the Fawcett Prize, she has taught at Harvard; the University of California, Los Angeles; Birkbeck, London and the Centre for Editing Lives and Letters at Queen Mary, London. She is a visiting professor in the Department of History, Classics and Archaeology, Birkbeck, University of London, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Elaine Feinstein</span> English poet and writer (1930–2019)

Elaine Feinstein FRSL was an English poet, novelist, short-story writer, playwright, biographer and translator. She joined the Council of the Royal Society of Literature in 2007.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ruth Scurr</span> British historian and literary critic

Dr Ruth Scurr FRSL, aka Lady Stothard, is a British writer, historian and literary critic. She is a Fellow of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge.

George Duncan Painter OBE, known as George D. Painter, was an English author most famous as a biographer of Marcel Proust.

Andrew Michael Duncan Lycett FRSL is an English biographer and journalist.

Jennifer Sheila Uglow is an English biographer, historian, critic and publisher. She was an editorial director of Chatto & Windus. She has written critically acclaimed biographies of Elizabeth Gaskell, William Hogarth, Thomas Bewick, and Edward Lear, and a history and joint biography of the Lunar Society, among others, and has also compiled The Macmillan Dictionary of Women's Biography.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sarah Maguire</span> British writer

Sarah Maguire was a British poet, translator and broadcaster.

The Jewish Quarterly-Wingate Literary Prize is an annual British literary prize inaugurated in 1977. It is named after the host Jewish Quarterly and the prize's founder Harold Hyam Wingate. The award recognises Jewish and non-Jewish writers resident in the UK, British Commonwealth, Europe and Israel who "stimulate an interest in themes of Jewish concern while appealing to the general reader". As of 2011 the winner receives £4,000.

Claire Harman is a British literary critic and book reviewer who has written for the Times Literary Supplement, Literary Review, Evening Standard, the Sunday Telegraph and other publications. Harman is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and has taught English at the Universities of Oxford and Manchester. She has taught creative writing at Columbia University, and been Professor of Creative Writing at Durham University since 2016.

Barbara Gladys Hardy, was a British literary scholar, author, and poet. As an academic, she specialised in the literature of the 19th Century. From 1965 to 1970, she was Professor of English at Royal Holloway College, University of London. Then, from 1970 to 1989, she was Professor of English Literature at Birkbeck College, University of London.

Suzanne O'Sullivan is an Irish neurologist and author.

Daisy Hay is Associate Professor in English Literature and Life Writing at the University of Exeter and an author of non-fiction. Hay was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2018.

References

  1. Zeljka Marosevic, "Critical Thinking #5: Marina Warner", Prospect , 8 May 2014.
  2. "Other activities" Archived 24 April 2018 at the Wayback Machine , MarinaWarner.com; accessed 1 January 2015.
  3. Marina Warner, "Why I Quit", London Review of Books, 11 September 2014.
  4. Marina Warner, "Learning My Lesson",London Review of Books, 19 March 2015.
  5. Jonathan Brown, "Marina Warner compares UK university managers to 'Chinese communist enforcers'", The Independent, 3 September 2014.
  6. "Celebrated author and academic Marina Warner joins Birkbeck", bbk.ac.uk, 29 September 2014.
  7. "Royal Society of Literature elects Marina Warner as its first female President", Press Release, The Royal Society of Literature, 2017.
  8. 1 2 "First woman boss for RSL", BookBrunch, 17 March 2017.
  9. "Professor Marina Warner elected first female President of the Royal Society of Literature", Birkbeck, University of London, 6 April 2017.
  10. "Professor Dame Marina Warner". All Souls College, University of Oxford. Retrieved 3 June 2021.
  11. "Stories in Transit, People" . Retrieved 10 June 2021.
  12. 1 2 "The Holberg Prize Names British Storyteller and Fairytale Critic Marina Warner as 2015 Laureate", Press Release, Oxford University Press, 12 March 2015.
  13. 1 2 3 Higgins, Charlotte (6 March 2021). "Interview – Marina Warner". The Guardian. Retrieved 7 March 2021.,
  14. Marina Warner, "My grandfather, Plum", The Guardian, 11 June 2004.
  15. 1 2 3 Profile Archived 15 December 2010 at the Wayback Machine , Contemporary Writers.com; accessed 31 December 2014.
  16. Isis, no. 1523, 9 November 1966, p. 1.
  17. Rebecca Guinness, "London Artist Conrad Shawcross Makes His Mark in New York", Vanity Fair, 12 June 2009.
  18. Publications, Europa (31 December 2003). The International Who's Who 2004. Psychology Press. ISBN   9781857432176 via Google Books.
  19. Nicholas Wroe, "Absolutely fabulist", The Guardian, 22 January 2000.
  20. Gleick, Elizabeth (24 May 1999). "Books: Boo! (Scared Yet?)". Time . Retrieved 25 July 2014.
  21. Non-Fiction Publications, Marina Warner website.
  22. "Royal Society of Literature All Fellows". Royal Society of Literature. Archived from the original on 5 March 2010. Retrieved 10 August 2010.
  23. "Marina Warner", British Council, Literature.
  24. "About Marina Warner", marinawarner.com; accessed 31 December 2014.
  25. "No. 58729". The London Gazette (Supplement). 14 June 2008. p. 8.
  26. Marina Warner, "Diary", London Review of Books, Vol. 36, No. 17, 11 September 2014, pp. 42–43.
  27. "Recent news", marinawarner.com; retrieved 11 November 2014.
  28. "No. 61092". The London Gazette (Supplement). 31 December 2014. p. N8.
  29. 2015 New Year Honours List Archived 2 January 2015 at the Wayback Machine , gov.uk; accessed 31 December 2014.
  30. "Weidenfeld Visiting Professorship in Comparative European Literature", St Anne's College, University of Oxford.
  31. "Bernardine Evaristo Announced as New President of the RSL". Royal Society of Literature. Retrieved 11 April 2024.
  32. "Marina Warner announced as RSL President Emerita". Royal Society of Literature. Retrieved 11 April 2024.
  33. Quash, Carol (28 April 2019). "A rich blend of literary talent". Trinidad and Tobago Newsday .
  34. "Bocas Judge's talk" (PDF). marinawarner.com. 4 May 2019. Retrieved 11 April 2024.
  35. 1 2 "No. 63714". The London Gazette (Supplement). 1 June 2022. p. B6.
  36. "Dame Marina Warner". The Royal Society of Literature. Retrieved 3 June 2021.
  37. "The Lost Father". The Booker Prizes. Retrieved 3 June 2021.
  38. Mohit K. Ray (ed.), "Warner, Marina (1946– )", in The Atlantic Companion to Literature in English, Atlantic Publishers, 2007, p. 559.
  39. 1 2 3 4 "Academy of Europe Warner Marina". Academy of Europe. Retrieved 8 July 2021.
  40. John Williams (14 January 2012). "National Book Critics Circle Names 2012 Award Finalists". The New York Times . Retrieved 15 January 2013.
  41. John Williams (1 March 2013). "Robert A. Caro, Ben Fountain Among National Book Critics Circle Winners". The New York Times. Retrieved 31 December 2014.
  42. "2013 Sheikh Zayed Book Award Winners Announced". zayedaward.ae. 3 April 2013. Archived from the original on 10 November 2013. Retrieved 9 November 2013.
  43. "Sheikh Zayed Book Award promotes new category in Berlin". Khaleej Times . 10 September 2012. Retrieved 8 October 2012.
  44. "Marina Warner" Archived 1 August 2017 at the Wayback Machine , The Holberg Prize 2015.
  45. "From Wikipedia to Roman coins: British Academy recognises excellence in the humanities and social sciences". The British Academy. 27 September 2017. Retrieved 5 October 2017.
Awards and achievements
Preceded by
Elizabeth Wright
Karen O'Brien
Rose Mary Crawshay Prize
2000
and
Joanne Wilkes
Succeeded by
Annette Peach
Lucy Newlyn