Professor Marina Warner recognised in New Year Honours List
Birkbeck Professor awarded DBE for services to higher education and literary scholarship
Award-winning writer Marina Warner CBE (pictured, right), Professor of English and Creative Writing in the Department of English and Humanities in Birkbeck’s School of Arts has been made a Dame in the New Year Honours list. She was awarded a DBE for services to higher education and literary scholarship.
Professor Warner joined Birkbeck in September 2014 and lectures on literature and creative writing. Her writings include her non-fiction studies Alone of all her sex: the myth and cult of the Virgin Mary (1976) and Stranger Magic: Charmed States and the Arabian Nights (2011), and, among her fiction, the 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 sat on the judging panels for the Booker Prize and Turner Prize and is currently Chair of the Man Booker International Prize panel.
Her most recent work of literary criticism, published in 2014, is Once upon a time: a short history of fairy tale (Oxford University Press). She has a collection of short stories coming out this autumn, and is currently working on a novel inspired by her father’s bookshop in Egypt in the 1950s entitled Inventory of a life mislaid.
Her academic career has included fellowships and visiting professorships at the Getty Institute for the Humanities; Erasmus University, Rotterdam; Trinity College, Cambridge; Princeton University, New York University, and All Souls College, Oxford, where she is a Fellow.
Professor David Latchman CBE, Master of Birkbeck, said: “The College warmly congratulates Professor Warner on this recognition of her contribution to literary scholarship.”
Professor Warner said: “I was absolutely astonished to receive this honour, but am thrilled, of course. I am also delighted as I haven’t had the most conventional career – you could perhaps call it erratic – and yet this recognition has still come. I haven’t quite got used to it yet!
“It is also particularly pleasing to receive this public affirmation as I feel it’s a very good signal to all those working in the literary and scholarly sphere that our work is worthwhile, and is recognised.”
[Photo credit: Dan Welldon]