How to Create Sanctuary Now?

• 15/07/2025
• 19:00-20:30
• online talk

How to Create Sanctuary Now?

A Folklore Society online talk

by

Professor Dame Marina Warner

Tuesday 15 July, 19:00 BST

Sanctuary for someone fleeing for their life operated as a sacred principle in classical antiquity, and offered protection to fugitives from the law in medieval times in Europe, until the Reformation. In times of mass displacements, when millions are being driven from their homes by wars, climate change and attendant ills, and are being met with ever growing hostility, can anything of the ancient right to Sanctuary be revived and adapted? How can sanctuary as shelter , as an alternative to the lost home, be remade? I will explore how traditions of storytelling can meet and cross-fertilise and build a commons of wonder.

Marina Warner writes fiction, criticism, and history, focusing especially on myth and fairy tale. Her books include Stranger Magic: Charmed States and the Arabian Nights (2012) and Inventory of a Life Mislaid: An Unreliable Memoir (2021). She is Professor of English and Creative Writing at Birkbeck College, University of London, a Distinguished Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, and a Fellow of the British Academy. In 2015 she was given the Holberg Prize by the government of Norway. Sanctuary: Ways of Telling, Ways of Dwelling came out in July 2025. The exhibition The Shelter of Stories will open at Compton Verney in October.

Tickets £6.00 (£4.00 for Folklore Society members with the Promo Code: just log in to https://folklore-society.com/members-only to get the Promo Code) from https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/how-to-create-sanctuary-now-tickets-1430210039729?

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Photo credit: Dan Welldon (https://www.danwelldon.com/)