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Sarah Sentilles: Draw Your Weapons

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Across four books, and the striking Drone Alerts project, US-based writer Sarah Sentilles has plumbed questions of spirituality and absolution, life and death. In Draw Your Weapons, Sentilles turns her eye to art and war; metaphor and survival. How do we create, accept, understand and recover from violence? How do we live with it?

In a deft and genre-crossing exposition, Draw Your Weapons deploys ideas from memoir, criticism, journalism, literature, visual culture and theology. It centres on two people – one a former prison guard at Abu Ghraib, the other a conscientious objector to World War II – and the work of understanding suffering, and rediscovering dignity, through art. In breathless reviews, critics have likened it to Maggie Nelson or Susan Sontag, and labelled it transformative, fierce and brilliant.

At the Wheeler Centre, Sentilles will dig into our world’s most brutal and profound instincts with critic and writer Maria Tumarkin.

Paperback Books will be our bookseller at this event.

Featuring

Sarah Sentilles

A former theologian, Sarah Sentilles completed her undergraduate degree at Yale and both a Masters and a Doctorate at Harvard. She was a college professor for over a decade before becoming a full time writer and is now a passionate advocate for life lived by peace and principle. She is the author of... Read more

Maria Tumarkin

Maria Tumarkin writes books, essays, reviews, and pieces for performance and radio; she collaborates with sound and visual artists and has had her work carved into dockside tiles. She is the author of four books of ideas. Her fourth (and latest) book Axiomatic won the 2018 Melbourne Prize for Lit... Read more

Location

The Wheeler Centre

176 Little Lonsdale Street Melbourne Victoria 3000

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The Wheeler Centre acknowledges the Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung people of the Kulin Nation as the Traditional Owners of the land on which the Centre stands. We acknowledge and pay our respects to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and their Elders, past and present, as the custodians of the world’s oldest continuous living culture.