Warner, Marina

(British, 1946– )

As a historian and critic Warner is largely concerned with the power of myth and fantasy in shaping women's identities. These concerns are extended into her novels. The Lost Father (1988) is a semi-autobiographical account of a woman living in England who sets out to discover her family roots in southern Italy. Warner's prose has a slow, dreamy quality and she captures the rhythms of peasant life and religious observance in early twentieth-century Italy in great detail. The Skating Party (1982) depicts a skating party on the English Fens and draws together fragments of myth, painting, and tribal custom to create a picture of people at odds in their need for love and in their ways of obtaining it. Indigo (1992), inspired by Shakespeare's The Tempest, rewrites the drama in a Caribbean setting, exploring the colonial conflicts of an imaginary island and one family.

Angela Carter, Lisa St Aubin de Teran, A. S. Byatt  DJ