Birkbeck professor awarded the Companion of Honour in Queen's Jubilee Birthday Honours list
Professor Dame Marina Warner CBE received the award for services to the humanities.
Professor of English and Creative Writing, Dame Marina Warner, has been awarded the Companion of Honour for services to the humanities, in the Queen’s Jubilee Birthday Honours list.
The Companion of Honour award recognises sustained service of national importance, and is limited to only 65 people in total, illustrating the scale and impact of Dame Marina’s work within the arts and humanities.
The honours lists traditionally celebrate people with remarkable achievements in public life, as a way of thanking volunteers, innovators, community leaders or those who display moral courage.
Dame Marina commented: “The honour is a great surprise, and I am especially delighted that my work as a writer and a teacher have been recognised at a time when education in the arts and humanities is under stress from policy-makers.”
Dame Marina has had a particularly rich career as not only an academic but also a novelist, cultural historian, art critic, curator, librettist, broadcaster, essayist, and critic. She is a contributing editor to The London Review of Books, a Fellow of the British Academy, a Distinguished Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, and, from 2017-2021, President of the Royal Society of Literature. She was made DBE in 2015, and the same year was awarded the Holberg Prize in the Arts and Humanities. In 2017 she was given a British Academy Medal and a World Fantasy Lifetime Achievement Award. She is currently patron of the Ted Hughes Society, Bloodaxe Books, the Society for Story Telling, and The Longford Trust.
Joining the Birkbeck Professor as recipients of the exclusive award, were acclaimed novelist Sir Salman Rushdie and celebrated illustrator Sir Quentin Blake. They joined a prestigious list of names that includes the likes of Sir David Attenborough, Dame Judy Dench and Margaret Atwood.