We are delighted to welcome Marina Warner to the Authors’ Club to talk about Sanctuary (William Collins)

What does sanctuary mean today? Drawing on a lifetime of engagement with literature, myth, history and tradition from different cultures, Marina Warner’s Sanctuary is an ambitious attempt to grapple with the sharpest questions that we are facing in today’s world of global turmoil.

Sanctuary is an ancient right– a haven, a place of refuge and freedom from harm. In the classical world, it offered immunity to fugitives from justice; in medieval Europe it extended a reprieve to all who sought sanctuary in a church or holy site. It was a sacrilege to lay hands on a sanctuary-seeker: sanctuary was sacred.

Increasingly, in keeping with the general growth of nationalism and individualism, the arc of the concept has been bending away from a place of openness and welcome towards a private safe place, a redoubt: home and homeland as sanctuaries to be defended against strangers, migrants, incomers.

In this groundbreaking book, the distinguished cultural historian Marina Warner explores the principles that underpin the tradition of ‘sanctuary’. She ranges broadly across myth and history and explores the concept of hospitality, the cult of relics, shrines and festivals, the imagination of place, and travelling tales. She asks profound questions about political ideas of a right to safety, home, freedom of movement, and peace.

Sanctuary was written alongside work with the project “Stories in Transit” which brings young refugees together with artists, writers and musicians in the UK and in Sicily to invent or reimagine stories and perform them. Marina Warner reflects on the ways stories address the worst experiences of humanity and argues that the act of storytelling offers a salve, a route to a site of mutual interaction and understanding, a new place of belonging and conviviality.

Marina Warner is a pioneer in the academic study of myth, but in 1985 she was prominent for her provocative books reappraising the likes of the Virgin Mary and Joan of Arc as feminist figures.

Warner’s claims to fame are multifarious: not only was her grandfather the great English cricketer Sir Pelham Warner but she is herself the ‘lady writer’ of the Dire Straits song, ‘talking about the Virgin Mary’ on television. The majority of her work is non-fiction and her writings on the meaning of fairy tales and myth have made her a leading public intellectual. As well as having two of her novels shortlisted and longlisted for the prize, she has herself been a judge for the Booker Prize in 1985 and also for the International Booker Prize in 2015. She was added to the Companions of Honour in the Queen’s Birthday Honours list in 2022.

To book please contact the booking office at bookings@nlc.org.uk or call 020 7968 0912.

The two-course lunch, followed by coffee, costs £39. It’s in the Lady Violet Room and we start with drinks at 12:30pm.  Please book early and inform the club of any dietary requirements.