Marina Warner, the prize-winning writer of fiction, criticism and history visited Malta in May at the invitation of the British Council and University of Malta.

The British Council and the Faculty of Arts’ Department of English 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 spoke 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 18.30 The second lecture, titled “Voices and Footfalls: Traces of the Feminine in Fiction”, will be delivered on 9 May, at 15.00.

A prize-winning author of fiction as well as a cultural historian, Marina Warner has published scholarly texts on the portrayal of the 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, contributing articles to journals and newspapers. 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.

Her fictional writing draws on personal memory, such as The Lost Father (1988), a novel that draws on her Italianate origins. Her work was short-listed for the Booker Prize and won her the Commonwealth Writers Prize (Best Book, Eurasia Region). Among her forthcoming publications, one finds 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 is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature since 1985.

Further information on Prof. Warner’s visit may be obtained by contacting the British Council at info@britishcouncil.org.mt or the Department of English at the University of Malta on 23402963.  

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