Born to an English father and Italian mother in London in 1946, Marina Warner grew up in Cairo, Brussels and Cambridge. She then read Modern Languages at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford. A writer of criticism, fiction and history, Warner has a major interest in female myth and symbols and now is professor in the Department of Literature, Film and Theatre Studies at the University of Essex, where she teaches on fairy tales and other forms of narrative.

The author of The Dragon Empress: Life and Times of T'su-hsi 1835-1908 (1972), Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary (1976) and Queen Victoria’s Sketch Book (1979), Warner was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1985. Her novel The Lost Father, a romance about the dream of America in Italy during the Fascist era, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1988 and won the Commonwealth Writers Prize and PEN / Macmillan Silver Pen Award in 1989. Warner has also written for children, The Impossible Day (1981) and The Wobbly Tooth (1984), as well as the libretto for the children’s opera The Legs of the Queen of Sheba, produced by English National Opera in 1991. She also regularly contributes articles, essays and reviews to newspapers, journals and artists' catalogues.

In 1994, Warner became the only second woman to deliver the BBC's Reith Lectures, published as Managing Monsters: Six Myths of Our Time. A critical analysis of the workings of myth in contemporary society, she focussed on the entertainment industry and the political world, in particular. A member of the Literature Panel at the Arts Council of England from 1992 to 1998, and a member of the committee of PEN from 2001 to 2004, she was awarded the Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in France in 2000 and the Stella della Solidarietà in Italy in 2003. Warner was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 2005.

Marina Warner lives in London. Her son, Conrad Shawcross, is a sculptor.