Professor Dame Marina Warner FBA

History; historical studies of language and literature; English language and literature

Elected 2005

Marina Warner is an award-winning novelist, short story writer, historian, and mythographer, who works across genres and cultures exploring myths and stories. She has focused especially on fairy tales and the Arabian Nights (in Stranger Magic (2011), and Once Upon a Time (2014)). The interrelationship between stories and migration have long been an area of inquiry (the novel The Leto Bundle (2000) and Sanctuary: Ways of Telling, Ways of Dwelling (2025). In 2015 she was awarded the prestigious Holberg Prize. She is a Distinguished Fellow of All Souls, and Professor of English and Creative Writing at Birkbeck College, University of London. From 2017-2021, Warner served as President of the Royal Society of Literature, the 19th – and first woman – to hold the post. Her Forms of Enchantment: Writings on Art and Artists was published by Thames & Hudson in September 2018 and came out in paperback in 2024. She was made DBE in 2015 and CH in 2023.

10-Minute Talks: The power of stories and the practice of rhetoric

3 Mar 2021 Professor Dame Marina Warner FBA

Professor Marina Warner FBA argues that in an era of public disinformation, the study of the uses of rhetoric, as deployed in many forms of literature, is urgently needed.

Current post

Birkbeck, University of London Professor of English and Creative Writing

SOAS, University of London Professorial Research Fellow

Past appointments

All Souls College University of Oxford Quondam Fellow

2017 - 2019

All Souls College University of Oxford Fellow

2013 - 2017

University of Essex Professor, Department of Literature, Film and Theatre Studies, University of Essex

2004 - 2014

Trinity College, Cambridge Visiting Fellow Commoner

1997 - 1998

Erasmus University, Rotterdam Tinbergen Professor

1991 -

Getty Research Institute Visiting Scholar

1987 - 1988

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