Shelter in Literature: The Places We Seek, Leave and Imagine
Episode Three of The Sussex Contemporary Podcast
SERIES TITLE: SHELTER
In our last episode we explored Shelter through art. This time, we turn to literature, and to the way stories have always carried us into places of shelter: houses, huts, castles, bedrooms, tents, hidden rooms, imagined worlds.
But in literature, shelter is rarely only a setting. The places characters inhabit reveal who holds power, who belongs, who is protected and who remains outside. A house can represent safety, but it can also become a prison. A room can offer privacy, but it can also conceal someone from danger. A wall can protect a community, but it can also isolate that community from the world beyond it.
Here are eight works that show just how differently literature has imagined shelter, and why they matter to anyone thinking about THE SUSSEX 2026: Shelter
Homer's Odyssey home as the destination
After the Trojan War, Odysseus spends years travelling through storms, shipwrecks and danger, repeatedly offered forms of shelter that are unstable at best, a welcoming island can conceal a trap, a palace can separate him from the life he's trying to reach. For Odysseus, home is more than a building, it's his wife, his son, his land, his identity. Even when he finally arrives, disguised, he must first be recognised before he can belong there again. Shelter and belonging, the poem suggests, are not quite the same thing.
Kamo no Chōmei's Hōjōki (1212) shelter as withdrawal
Writing after a period of fire, famine and earthquakes in medieval Japan, Chōmei withdraws from society into a small, deliberately temporary hut. Rather than build something stronger, he builds something smaller, an acceptance that everything we own may eventually disappear. It's a different idea of security altogether: not resistance, but reduction. And it raises a question that still feels current, at what point does sanctuary tip into isolation?
Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre (1847) being housed without belonging
Jane moves through a succession of imposing houses and institutions, Gateshead, Lowood, Thornfield Hall, and rarely feels safe or accepted in any of them. Brontë separates having somewhere to live from having dignity and agency. Jane isn't searching only for security; she's searching for a home she can belong to without becoming smaller within it.
Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own (1929) shelter as creative independence
Woolf's essay argues that creative freedom needs material support: time, privacy, income, a door that can be closed. The room is real and symbolic at once. For generations, many women maintained domestic shelter without being granted any space of their own inside it. For artists and makers today, the question still lands: not everyone has a studio, so what else might serve as a room of one's own?
Anne Frank's diary (1942–44) shelter as concealment
The Secret Annex protected its eight occupants for over two years, but it was never truly safe, windows covered, movement restricted, the threat of discovery shaping every hour. Within that confinement, Anne's writing built another kind of room: somewhere to question, imagine and remain herself. It's one of literature's most enduring forms of shelter, when physical freedom is restricted, language can still preserve identity.
John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (1939) — shelter lost, and rebuilt through solidarity
Driven from their Oklahoma farm by the Dust Bowl and the Depression, the Joad family loses far more than a building — stability, livelihood, community. On the road, shelter becomes a vehicle, a roadside camp, a government settlement, endlessly rebuilt. But the novel also shows people sharing food, knowledge and protection when formal systems fail. Shelter, here, is created through relationships as much as property.
Warsan Shire's poem Home when escape is the only protection
Shire's poem challenges the assumption that migration begins with a simple wish to leave, asking instead what conditions make staying impossible. Home is meant to be the place of greatest safety, so what happens when it becomes the source of danger? The poem restores individual humanity to words like "migrant" and "refugee," and asks what we'd carry, and what sense of home we could rebuild elsewhere.
(The poem features in Shire's debut pamphlet, linked above.)
Octavia E. Butler's Parable of the Sower (1993) shelter in a climate-damaged future
Lauren Olamina grows up inside a gated community whose walls offer only fragile protection from a world reshaped by climate change and inequality. When the walls fail, shelter has to be rebuilt, not as a return to the past, but through adaptability and shared purpose. Butler's novel turns shelter into a question about the future: not only where will we live, but how will we live together?
A progression, not a checklist
Read together, these eight works trace a kind of arc:
homecoming → retreat → exclusion → independence → concealment → displacement → migration → an uncertain future.
Across all of them, shelter keeps changing shape. It's a destination, a retreat, a privilege, a concealment, a creative space, something lost, something imagined anew. It can be a person, a memory, a private thought, a shared story, a community — or the possibility of beginning again. Literature allows shelter to exist even when the walls themselves disappear.
Bringing it back to Shelter
As we head towards THE SUSSEX 2026: Shelter, these eight works offer rich starting points for artists and makers working in any discipline:
What stories of shelter do we inherit?
Which shelters protect us, and which restrict us?
Can somewhere be home if we are not accepted there?
What do we carry when a physical home is lost?
Can an artwork create a form of shelter for an idea, experience or memory?
THE SUSSEX 2026 open call welcomes artists and makers from all disciplines with a meaningful connection to the United Kingdom.
Submissions close 30 September 2026 23:59
Listen to Episode Three of The Sussex Contemporary Podcast, presented by Jo Myles, for the full exploration of these eight works.