"The vocabulary of pleasure depends on the imagery of pain." -- Marina Warner
Marina Sarah Warner, CBE, FBA (born 9 November 1946 in London, England) 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 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, and studied French and Italian at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford. She attended St Mary's School Ascot, and received an honorary doctorate (DLitt) from the University of Oxford on 21 June 2006. In 1971 she married William Shawcross, with whom she had a son Conrad Shawcross, though they later divorced.
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 Catholic adoration of the Virgin Mary. These were followed by Monuments & Maidens: The Allegory of the Female Form and Joan of Arc: The Image of Female Heroism.
Her novel The Lost Father was on the Booker Prize shortlist in 1988; the non-fiction 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.. Her other novels include The Leto Bundle and Indigo.
She gave the 1994 Reith Lectures, Managing Monsters, is an Honorary Professor of St Andrews University and is a current Professor at the University of Essex.
Her latest book is Phantasmagoria (2006), tracing the ways in which 'the spirit' has been represented across different mediums, from waxworks to cinema.
She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1984.She was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 2008 Birthday Honours.
