Date	Monday 19 June 2023
Time	19.00-20.00 BST (followed by drinks reception to 20.45)
Location	At the Museum or Online (Zoom)
Speaker	Professor Dame Marina Warner

The 2023 Frederick Ashton Lecture, in association with the Wallace Collection. 

Please note that onsite tickets for this event are now sold out, but you can still book a ticket to join us online.

The Frederick Ashton Lecture Series was inaugurated by the Frederick Ashton Foundation in 2019 to both honour the memory of the choreographer Sir Frederick Ashton and advance public understanding and debate about the arts. Ashton’s understanding of the human condition, his knowledge of historic style and the influences of artists with whom he collaborated, fed his genius. He was inspired when creating his ballets not just by music and movement but by a range of interests, including the visual arts, architecture, design, literature and poetry, and thus the subject matter of each biannual lecture is selected from the arts in their widest sense.  

Previous lectures, presented in association with the Wallace Collection, have been delivered by Sir Nicholas Hytner on ‘theatre’ and Lord Berkeley of Knighton (the composer and broadcaster Michael Berkeley) on ‘music’. We are delighted that the 2023 Lecture is to be given by Dame Marina Warner, whose lecture will focus on ‘literature’ and is titled: ‘Out of This World : Dancing into fairylands’ 

About the Speaker: Prof Dame Marina Warner has been a writer since she was young, specialising in mythology and fairy tales, with an emphasis on the part women play in them. Her award-winning books include From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers (1994) and No Go the Bogeyman (1998), alongside Phantasmagoria: Spirit Visions, Metaphors, and Media (2006), Stranger Magic: Charmed States and The Arabian Nights (2011), Forms of Enchantment: Writing on Art and Artists (2018) and Fairy Tale: A Very Short Introduction (2018).  

Prof Dame Marina was shortlisted for the Booker Prize; she is a contributing editor to The London Review of Books, a Fellow of the British Academy, a Quondam Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, and was President of the Royal Society of Literature. Among many distinguished awards and honorary titles and doctorates, she has received a British Academy Medal, World Fantasy Life Time Achievement Award and the Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, France. 

Take part at the Museum: Join us at the museum for this special talk. Doors open 18.30; drinks reception to 20.45. 

Watch Online: This talk will also be broadcast live from the museum. Online ticketholders will be emailed a link to join 24 hours in advance. Online ticketholders will also receive a link to view a recording of the talk, which will be available for one week only.