Marina Warner

Dame Marina Sarah Warner, DBE, FRSL, FBA (born 1946) is a British 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 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.

She 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 (published by Robert Maxwell). In 1971, she married William Shawcross, with whom she had a son, Conrad. The couple divorced in 1980.

Illustration from
No Go the Bogeyman

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).

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 2000 and won the British Academy's Rose Mary Crawshay Prize that year. Warner's other novels include The Leto Bundle (2001) and Indigo (1992). 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. A collection of her writings about art was published Violette Editions in 2014 under the title The Symbol Gives Rise to Thought.

She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1984. She gave the 1994 Reith Lectures on Managing Monsters and was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 2008 Birthday Honours for services to literature. She received an honorary doctorate (DLitt) from the University of Oxford on 21 June 2006. She 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).

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 currently a Fellow of All Souls College Oxford and Chair of the judges of the Man Booker International Prize 2015.

In March 2017, Warner was elected as the Royal Society of Literature's 19th — and first female — president, succeeding Colin Thubron in the post.

• 1984 Elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature
• 1986 Fawcett Society Book Prize for Monuments and Maidens: The Allegory of the Female Form
• 1988 Booker Prize for Fiction (shortlist) for The Lost Father
• 1989 Commonwealth Writers Prize (Eurasia Region, Best Book) for The Lost Father
• 1989 PEN/Macmillan Silver Pen Award for The Lost Father
• 1996 Mythopoeic Award for From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers
• 1999 Katharine Briggs Folklore Award for No Go the Bogeyman: Scaring, Lulling and Making Mock
• 2000 Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (France)
• 2000 Rose Mary Crawshay Prize for English Literature for No Go the Bogeyman: Scaring, Lulling and Making Mock
• 2005 Elected Fellow of the British Academy
• 2012 National Book Critics Circle Award (Criticism) for Stranger Magic: Charmed States and the Arabian Nights
• 2013 Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism for Stranger Magic
• 2013 Sheikh Zayed Book Award for Arab Culture in Non-Arabic Languages for Stranger Magic
• 2013 All Souls College Oxford Two-Year Fellowship
• 2013 Mansfield College, Oxford, Honorary Fellow
• 2013 St Cross College, Oxford, Honorary Fellow
• 2015 Holberg Prize
• 2017 Royal Society of Literature president

Warner was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in 2008 and Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE) in the 2015 New Year Honours for services to higher education and literary scholarship.