The Holberg Lecture 2015: Marina Warner: "Losing Home, Finding Words: Transformations of Story"

Can myths, legends, and stories provide alternative shelter, literary lieux de mémoire where a refugee, a migrant, or a wanderer might feel at home? This lecture was held as a part of the Holberg Prize Symposium and the University of Bergen, June 9, 2015

'We live in the country of words,' wrote the late Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, in a poem that speaks to all people who are on the move, displaced from their homes for reasons of war, persecution, necessity. Can myths, legends, and stories provide alternative shelter, literary lieux de mémoire where a refugee, a migrant, or a wanderer might feel at home? Marina Warner will look at two mythic lost cities— Troy and Carthage—and explore their transmigrations in contemporary poetry and fiction. She will ask, with George Seferis: can literature be ‘strong enough to help’?

Professor Dame Marina Warner, FBA, is Professor of English and Creative Writing at Birkbeck College, University of London, Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, and Professorial Research Fellow at SOAS.