LAURIE DENNETT was born in Toronto and grew up in Agincourt, Ontario, Canada. She studied history at the University of Toronto, McMaster University in Hamilton, and the University of St Andrews, Scotland. As an independent historian in the City of London she was the author of eight commissioned histories, including those of Prudential, Slaughter and May and the Institute of Actuaries.

In 1986 she walked from Chartres, France, to Santiago de Compostela in aid of MS research funding. The 1987 memoir of her pilgrimage, A Hug For The Apostle, sold out in eight months and became a Camino classic. Later pilgrimages, also undertaken to raise awareness and funds for Multiple Sclerosis research, took her from London to Rome (1989) and Canterbury to Jerusalem (1992). Laurie chaired Britain’s Confraternity of Saint James from 1995 to 2003. She now lives near O Cebreiro in Galicia, where she hosts a ‘Quiet Garden’ that includes a replica of the Chartres cathedral labyrinth. Her most recent book was An American Princess: The Remarkable Life of Marguerite Chapin Caetani (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2016). A slightly revised, illustrated edition of A Hug For The Apostle was published by Words Indeed of Toronto in 2019.

The Road to Santiago, one of the great roads of Europe and of the world for longer than a millennium, links nations in ways that no bureaucracy ever can.
It exists for and because of a spiritual dimension to human life that transcends the barriers of language and creed. It holds out a personal goal to all. In a troubled world, it remains a symbol of international goodwill and a testament to the survival of the values that foster it.

– From the author’s notebook,
following a conference on the Camino de Santiago, Cologne, March 1987

Photo above:
The author, delighted at meeting Ursula Martin, who was walking from Kyiv to Santiago and stopped in O Cebreiro on 15 February 2021.
(photo Ursula Martin)