Organisers

Marina Warner is a writer of fiction, criticism and history; her works include novels and short stories as well as studies of art, myths, symbols and fairytales. She was born in London in 1946, of an Italian mother and an English father who was a bookseller. After primary schools in Cairo and Brussels, she was educated in England at St Mary’s Convent, Ascot, and then read French and Italian as an undergraduate at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, of which she is now an Honorary Fellow.

Distinguished Fellow, All Souls, Oxford, 2019
The Holberg Prize, 2015.
Two Year Fellowship, All Souls College Oxford, 2013.
Honorary Fellow at St Cross College, Oxford.
Honorary Fellow at Mansfield College, Oxford.
She is Distinguished Visiting professor at NYU Abu Dhabi from January 2012.
She was elected a fellow of the British Academy in 2005, and was made a CBE for services to literature in 2008.
She is President of the British Comparative Literature Association (BCLA) for the period 2010-2013 and was elected
a two-year Fellow at All Souls College Oxford in 2013.
She is currently a trustee of The National Portrait Gallery and patron of Hosking Houses Trust, Reprieve, The Society for Storytelling and is a patron of Bloodaxe Poetry Books.
She gave the BBC’s Reith Lectures in 1994.

She has been awarded Honorary Doctorates by:

King’s College London, 2009
Oxford University, 2006
University of Leicester, 2006
University of Kent, 2005
Royal College of Art, 2004
Tavistock Institute (University of East London), 1999
University of St Andrew’s, 1998
University of North London, 1997
University of York, 1997
Sheffield Hallam University, 1995
University of Exeter, 1995

Wen-chin Ouyang FBA is Professor of Arabic and Comparative Literature at SOAS, University of London. Born in Taiwan and raised in Libya, she completed her BA in Arabic at Tripoli University and PhD in Middle Eastern Studies at Columbia University in New York City. She is the author of Literary Criticism in Medieval Arabic-Islamic Culture: The Making of a Tradition (1997), Poetics of Love in the Arabic Novel (2012) and Politics of Nostalgia in the Arabic Novel (2013). She has also published widely on The Thousand and One Nights, often in comparison with classical and modern Arabic narrative traditions, European and Hollywood cinema, magic realism, and Chinese storytelling. She founded and co-edits Edinburgh Studies in Classical Arabic Literature. She has been the Editor-in-Chief of Middle Eastern Literatures since 2011. She also co-chairs the Editoral Committee of Legenda Studies in Comparative Literature. She was a member of the judging panel for Man Booker International Prize for Fiction 2013-15. A native speaker of Arabic and Chinese, she has been working towards Arabic-Chinese comparative literary and cultural studies, including Silk Road Studies.