Marina Warner

Marina Warner writes fiction, criticism, and cultural history. Her award-winning books explore myths and fairy tales; they include Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary (1976), From the Beast to the Blonde (1994), and Stranger Magic: Charmed States and the Arabian Nights (2011). Her essays on literature and art have been collected in Signs and Wonders (1994) and Forms of Enchantment: Writings on Art and Artists (2018). She has also curated exhibitions, most recently The Shelter of Stories (Compton Verney, 2025–2026), in which she explored the ideas in her most recent book, Sanctuary: Ways of Telling, Ways of Dwelling (2025). Since 2016, she has been working with the project www.storiesintransit.org in Palermo. In 2015, she was awarded the Holberg Prize in the Arts and Humanities. She is Professor of English and Creative Writing at Birkbeck College, a Distinguished Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, and a Fellow of the British Academy. She lives in London.