Dame Marina Sarah Warner, (born 9 November 1946) is an English historian, mythographer, art critic, novelist and short story writer. She is known for her many non-fiction books relating to feminism and myth. She has written for many publications, including The London Review of Books, the New Statesman, Sunday Times and Vogue. She has been a visiting professor, given lectures and taught on the faculties of many universities. She resigned from her position as Professor in the Department of Literature, Film and Theatre Studies at the University of Essex in 2014, sharply criticising moves towards "for-profit business model" universities in the UK, and is now Professor of English and Creative Writing at Birkbeck, University of London. In 2017 she was elected president of the Royal Society of Literature (RSL), the first time the role has been held by a woman since the founding of the RSL in 1820. She is a Distinguished Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, since 2019. In 2015, having received the prestigious Holberg Prize, Warner decided to use the award to start the Stories in Transit project, a series of workshops bringing international artists, writers and other creatives together with young migrants living in Palermo, Sicily. Biography Marina Warner was born in London to an English father, Esmond Warner (died 1982), and Ilia (née Emilia Terzulli, died 2008), an Italian whom he had met during the Second World War in Bari, Apulia. Her paternal grandfather was the cricketer Sir Pelham Warner. She has one sister, Laura Gascoigne, who is an art critic. Marina was brought up initially in Cairo, where her father ran a bookshop, until it was set on fire during attacks on foreign businesses in January 1952, a precursor to the Egyptian revolution. The family then moved to Brussels and to Cambridge, England, where Marina studied at St Mary's School, Ascot. She studied French and Italian at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford. While at Oxford she was the editor of Isis: a magazine for Oxford University (published by Robert Maxwell). In 1971, she married William Shawcross, with whom she has a son, the sculptor Conrad. The couple divorced in 1980. She was married to the painter John Dewe Mathews from 1981 to 1997. Her third husband is mathematician Graeme Segal. Warner may be the "lady writer" of the Dire Straits song with that title, whom the singer sees on television "talking about the Virgin Mary"