Marina Warner was educated in convents in Egypt, Belgium, and England, and studied French and Italian at Oxford. Her mother is Italian.
Her fiction includes the novels The Lost Father (l988, short-listed for the Booker), Indigo (l992), and The Leto Bundle (2000), and many short stories; her many award-winning studies of mythology and fairy-tales include Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary (l976), From the Beast to the Blonde (1994) and No Go the Bogeyman: Scaring, Lulling and Making Mock (1998).
In l994 she gave the BBC Reith Lectures on the theme of Six Myths of Our Time.
Recent studies include Fantastic Metamorphoses; Other Worlds (2002), and Phantasmagoria: Spirit Visions, Metaphors, and Media (2006), a study of phantasms and modern technologies.
Her essays have been collected: Signs & Wonders (2004), and the forthcoming The Symbol Gives Rise to Thought: Essays on Art. She has curated several exhibitions, most ecently Only Make-Believe: Ways of Playing (2005). She is currently working on a memoir-cum-novel, inspired by her father's bookshop in Cairo in the Fifties, and continuing her research into fairy-tales and magic with a study of the idea of the orient, Stranger Magic.
Since 2004, she has been Professor of Literature, Film, and Theatre Studies at the University of Essex. The British Academy elected her a Fellow in 2005, and Oxford University, St Andrew's, and others have made her an Hon. D. Litt.
Her son, Conrad Shawcross, a sculptor; she lives in London and Oxford.