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Stories on the move: suffering, sanctuary, danger (Fickling Lecture)

Marina Warner, novelist, historian and mythographer.

Date/Time: 3rd November 2016

Can myths, legends, and stories provide alternative shelter and offer sanctuary in times of dislocation and loss? A place where a refugee, a migrant, or a wanderer might feel at home?

In today’s geopolitical upheavals, when millions of people are on the move, how do narratives travel between cultures and languages? Travelling texts, such as stories, songs, and poems, play a vital part in building communities and, as they travel, they change shape.

Can we unite in ‘a country of words’, a place of belonging without a nation? We live in the stories we pass on and the stories we invent and how they report on experience; one of the territories that needs to be re-occupied is narrative.