Summary
Sanctuary is an ancient right. But what does it 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 medieva…
Book Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780008347574 |
|---|---|
| ISBN-10: | 0008347573 |
| Author: | Marina Warner |
| Publisher: | HarperCollins Publishers |
| Imprint: | William Collins |
| Format: | Paperback |
| Number of Pages: | 416 |
| Release Date: | 20 November 2026 |
| Weight: | 380g |
| Dimensions: | 36mm x 129mm x 198mm |
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Critics Review
PRAISE FOR SANCTUARY
‘Dazzlingly protean… an ambitious meditation on the ability of narrative to shape our perceptions of one another and our experience of home. Warner sets out to explore and expand what “sanctuary” means in an age when millions are on the move around the world, chased out of their homes by environmental disaster, economic collapse, war and political oppression… an exquisitely attuned reading of the situation’
Guardian
‘Sanctuary is without doubt an imaginative and meticulous work of scholarship, underpinned by context in Warner’s passionately sincere commitment to the issues she raises’
Daily Telegraph
‘Ingenious and meticulous.. Part of the exhilaration of reading any work by Warner is the breadth of reference. It is the opposite of dilletantism, a purposeful, sharp stitching: she will link and pierce from Anglo-Saxon Vercelli Manuscript to Jacobus de Voragine’s Golden Legend, Evelyn Waugh, Old King Cole, Seamus Heaney, Orhan Pamuk to Charles III’s coronation gift from the Pope. The idea of the story as a site (a camp-fire, a well, a glade) of exchange and safety and imagined possibility gives a fixed point to Warner’s capacious mind. More importantly, she reminds us why we call the discipline “the humanities”’
The Scotsman
‘Fascinating, erudite… a deeply engaging book, learned and sensitive, original, spare and strange. …reading it is like being led into a landscape both ravaged and stubbornly fertile. One of the book’s greatest strengths is Warner’s consistent use of the words of exiles, refugees and migrants. She does not just try to speak for her subjects; she gives them voice too. We can only listen and hope to God that others might be persuaded to listen too, especially in countries where hostility to the idea of sanctuary is being relentlessly fostered’
Rowan Williams, Literary Review
Marina Warner
Marina Warner’s study of the Arabian Nights, Stranger Magic (2011) won the Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism and the Sheikh Zayed Book Award in 2013. In 2015, she was awarded the Holberg Prize in the Arts and Humanities and was made DBE. She is a Professor of English and Creative Writing at Birkbeck College, a Fellow of the British Academy, and President of the Royal Society of Literature.
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