Celebrated author and academic Marina Warner joins Birkbeck, University of London

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Birkbeck, University of London

Sep 29, 2014, 08:15 ET


(PRWEB UK) 29 September 2014 -- Award-winning writer Marina Warner CBE – best known for her writings about feminism and myth – has expressed delight at being appointed Professor of English and Creative Writing at Birkbeck, University of London. She will lecture on literature and teach creative writing in her new role in the Department of English and Humanities in Birkbeck’s School of Arts.

Professor Warner said: “I could not have been more pleased when I heard about my appointment. Ever since I first came to London in the 1960s, I have admired Birkbeck, its principles, aims and ideals. Many of my mentors and friends have taught at Birkbeck, including the historian Eric Hobsbawm. I have been a feminist all my life and the flexibility of evening teaching makes a huge difference to women coming back to education. There is also a huge attraction to working in Bloomsbury as it is saturated with literary and political history.”

Professor Hilary Fraser, Dean of Birkbeck’s School of Arts, said: “We are delighted to welcome Marina Warner to Birkbeck. She has a rare breadth of intelligence and cultural reach, and brings together the creative and the critical, the literary and the visual, in ways that speak to the particular character of the School of Arts. Staff and students alike are excited by the opportunity to work with a writer and public intellectual of such eminence, one who is sympathetic to Birkbeck’s distinctive ethos and shares our values.”

Professor Warner’s most celebrated works include her non-fiction work Alone of all her sex: the myth and cult of the Virgin Mary (1976) and her novel The lost father, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1988. She was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 2005, and was made a CBE for services to literature in 2008. Professor Warner has also sat on the judging panels for the Booker Prize and Turner Prize.

Her most recent work of non-fiction, published this year, is called Once upon a time: a short history of fairy tale (Oxford University Press). She is currently chairing the judging panel for the Man Booker International Prize 2015, and is working on a novel inspired by her father’s bookshop in Egypt in the Fifties entitled Inventory of a life mislaid.

Her academic career has included teaching and research posts at the universities of Oxford, Cambridge, Stanford and Princeton.

Photo credit: Edward Park

ENDS

Notes to editors

  • To interview Professor Marina Warner about her appointment to Birkbeck, please contact Guy Collender (g.collender(AT)bbk.ac.uk, 0207 380 3108).
  • Birkbeck is a world-class research and teaching institution, a vibrant centre of academic excellence and London’s only specialist provider of evening higher education.
  • Birkbeck is ranked among the top one per cent of universities in the world, and has consistently ranked number one in the National Student Survey.
  • 18,000 students study at Birkbeck every year. They join a community that is as diverse and cosmopolitan as London’s population.
  • For more information about Birkbeck contact g.collender(AT)bbk.ac.uk, 0207 380 3108.

Guy Collender, Birkbeck, University of London, http://www.bbk.ac.uk, +44 2073803108 Ext: 3108, [email protected]