People

Creator - Professor Marina Warner, writer and scholar

Marina Warner’s books include From the Beast to the Blonde (1994) and Stranger Magic: Charmed States and The Arabian Nights (2011). She has curated exhibitions, including The Inner Eye (1996), Metamorphing (2002-3), and Only Make-Believe: Ways of Playing (2005). Her essays on art will be collected in Art & Enchantment (forthcoming Thames & Hudson). She is Professor of English and Creative Writing at Birkbeck College, a Professorial Research Fellow of SOAS, a Fellow of the British Academy and President-Elect of the Royal Society of Literature. In 2015, she was awarded the Holberg Prize in the Arts and Humanities and began the project Stories in Transit, in collaboration with Valentina Castagna.

Co-organiser - Dr. Valentina Castagna, lecturer of English Literature

Dr. Valentina Castagna is a research fellow in English literature at the Department of Humanities of the University of Palermo. She has published books and articles in the field of Women's Studies and Gender Studies, on popular genres and rewriting, on the contemporary novelist Michèle Roberts and on Margery Kempe’s autobiography. She edited and translated into Italian the radioplay La cella di Brìgit (Palermo, Quattrosoli, 2010) by Marina Warner and the collection "Limiti Naturali" e altre storie by the same author (Naples, Liguori, 2014). She is currently Associate Research Fellow at the Birkbeck College (University of London). She worked for several years as an independent interpreter and a translator for the Law Courts of Palermo.

To view the short biographies of the workshop participants please see ‘Workshops’ section.