Sanctuary: Ways of Telling, Ways of Dwelling
Forthcoming with HarperCollins, 3 July 2025

Marina will be launching her new book Sanctuary: Ways of Telling, Ways of Dwelling with lots of events over the coming months. For now (27/5/25), here are the list of upcoming talks and relevant events Marina is part of – if you would like to keep fully updated, have a look at her page Forthcoming:

June 13, 2025: Maps of home: Imagining sanctuary now (College of Sanctuary Lecture), Mansfield College, Oxford, 5.30-6.30pm

Acclaimed historian, mythographer, art critic and novelist Marina Warner reflects on the idea of home, and how we can imagine sanctuary today.

This biennial lecture highlights Mansfield College’s status as a College of Sanctuary under the UK Universities of Sanctuary scheme. Learn more about this here.

Register to attend here

English historian, mythographer, and author of Inventory of A Life Mislaid, Marina Warner will discuss her latest book about sanctuary: what it means for people in desperate situations today, and what refuge and displacement has meant for people throughout history, and the canons of literature and myth.

This event is part of an afternoon exploring Spirits, Salons and Sanctuary in the church of St Leonards through new books by poet and translator Philip Terry, poet and novelist Clare Pollard and cultural historian, mythographer and writer Marina Warner. These events are kindly supported by The Bean Trust.

Register to attend here

July 9 2024: LRB event – Marina in conversation with James Butler, 7pm, London Review Bookshop, 14 Bury Pl London WC1A 2JL, Tickets: £10

Marina discusses her new book on the ancient right of sanctuary and its meaning in the modern world with James Butler at the London Review Bookshop (14 Bury Pl London WC1A 2JL) at 7pm on 9 July 2025. Book here!

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.

More information here.

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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.

But what are the principles that govern this ancient tradition? Could a revived practice of sanctuary today offer security, a home for those who seek it? What could ‘sanctuary’ offer to those who have been displaced? Or does the idea support excluding those of a certain race or creed?

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. The project aspires to work with displaced individuals, whatever their status. Its work does not extend approval, tacitly or otherwise, to conditions that curtail the right to freedom of movement and work for refugees; no man or woman should be made to pay for their survival with their dignity. The project’s hope of improving those circumstances should not be taken as an acceptance (“normalisation”) of the restrictions imposed on arrivants from any country.

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. The book draws on a lifetime of engagement with literature, myth, history and tradition from different cultures. It is an ambitious attempt to grapple with the sharpest questions that we are facing in a world of global turmoil. Warner’s inquiry could not be more relevant.