Sanctuary: Ways of Telling, Ways of Dwelling, Marina Warner in conversation with Lisa Appignanesi
Sanctuary: Ways of Telling, Ways of Dwelling, is a book both passionate and erudite about refugees, refuge and the power of story.
Writer and Visiting Professor in Medical Humanities
19 Apr 2026
Citation-ready summary
Sanctuary: Ways of Telling, Ways of Dwelling, is a book both passionate and erudite about refugees, refuge and the power of story.
Author: Lisa Appignanesi
Last updated: 19 Apr 2026
Key Points
- The book plunges us into one of the most pressing and important social and political predicaments of our times. There are some 120million displaced people in the world today – the majority of them in the global south…
- The book navigates us away from the current legalistic and punitive registers of Sanctuary that surround refugees, that make us forget that America was in fact populated by people seeking refuge from inequities
- Marina Warner explores Sanctuary as both a vital problem of the contemporary world and as an idea in myth and religion.
Sanctuary
Marina Warner takes the idea into an ethical and imaginative register and consider it as a set of images, places, stories, as well as sometimes a very property of stories. Narrative itself is a dwelling.
Myths fairy tales pose vital questions about central aspects of existence and, regenerated in new re stories held in common – thought experiments. Ways of telling shape ways of dwelling alongside one another
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