Sarah Sentilles: Draw Your Weapons

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.