Two Lectures by Professor Marina Warner The British Council and the Department of English within the Faculty of Arts have the pleasure of announcing two lectures which will be delivered by the internationally acclaimed author and scholar, Professor Marina Warner. On Monday 8 May, Professor Warner will speak at the Literature and Comparison Seminar Series. The title of her lecture is “‘This is the very coinage of your brain’: Phantoms and Illusions in Hamlet and other plays”. The talk will take place in Lecture Theatre 2, at 18.30hrs. The second lecture, entitled “Voices and Footfalls: Traces of the Feminine in Fiction”, will be delivered on 9 May, at 15:00hrs in Lecture Theatre 1.

A prize-winning author of fiction as well as a cultural historian, Marina Warner has published scholarly texts on the portrayal of female archetypes in mythology, folklore and films. Born to an English father and an Italian mother in London in 1946, Professor Warner read for a modern languages degree in Italian and French at Oxford.

Professor Warner has published numerous non-fictional works and academic papers. Her first publications include The Dragon Empress (1972), a work that was translated into several languages, as well as Alone of All her Sex (1976), an analysis of the mythological and symbolic representations of the Marian cult across Europe and of the cultural influence that such a cult exerts upon society. Perhaps her most popular work is From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers (1994), an investigation of the female role in storytelling which ranges in its concerns from the classic prophetic Fates to the “Mother Goose” tradition, as well as offering re-readings of popular stories such as “Rapunzel” and “Sleeping Beauty”. Professor Warner’s work earned her both the Katherine Briggs Folklore Award in 1999, as well as the Rose Mary Crawshay Prize for English literature in 2000.

Some of her fictional writing, such as The Lost Father (1988), draws on personal memory and on her Italianate origins; in other narratives, like Indigo (1992), she puts to use techniques of rewriting and revisitation. Her work has been short-listed for the Booker Prize and won her the Commonwealth Writers Prize (Best Book, Eurasia Region). Her forthcoming publications will include Tales for Opera, Tales for Ballet and a collection of essays on art, called The Symbol Gives Rise to Thought. Both will be published in 2007.

Marina Warner has been a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature since 1985.

Detailed information about the author may be found at www.marinawarner.com.