The Anglo-Hellenic League Runciman Award
The Award
The Anglo-Hellenic League Runciman Award is awarded annually by the League for a work wholly or mainly about some aspect of Greece or the world of Hellenism, published in English in its first edition in the previous year.
The Award is named in honour of the late Sir Steven Runciman, Byzantine scholar and the League’s longest serving Chairman.
NEWS
The winner of the Anglo-Hellenic League Runciman Award 2023 is A.E. Stallings for This Afterlife: Selected Poems (Manchester: Carcanet 2022).
Credit: Julian Anderson
A prize of £10,000 was awarded to the winner on Monday 19 June at a well-attended ceremony in the Great Hall of King’s College London.
The Chair of the Council of the League, Dr John Kittmer, said: ‘Congratulations to Alicia Stallings for winning the Anglo-Hellenic League Runciman Award 2023: the first time in the history of the prize that the award has gone to a book of poems. It is richly deserved. It has been a pleasure, as always, to work with publishers, authors and our judges to bring about this competition. We are grateful particularly to Peter Frankopan, now stepping down after three years as chair of our judging panels; he has performed a remarkable service.’
The full press release can be found here.
History & Aims
The Award began in 1986 and since then various private sources, business and institutions with an interest in the promotion of Greek culture have provided generous sponsorship. The current joint sponsors are the Athanasios C. Laskaridis Charitable Foundation and the A. G. Leventis Foundation.
The award aims to stimulate interest in all aspects of Greek culture from ancient times, through Byzantium and the War of Independence to the present day; and to promote wider knowledge and understanding of Greece’s contribution to civilization and values.
Books covering all aspects of Greek culture are eligible. Works of fiction, poetry or drama, and translations from Greek literature are also eligible.
The Award aims particularly to reward and encourage good and accessible writing, following the fine example set by Sir Steven.
A long list is selected by the Judges from book nominations submitted by publishers in any given year. The long list is typically published in January. The judges then establish and publish a short list, usually in April.
Judges
Judith Mossman
Judith Mossman (Chair of Judges) read Classics at Corpus Christi College Oxford. After a Junior Research Fellowship at Christ Church, Oxford, she taught at Trinity College, Dublin from 1991 until 2003, becoming a Senior Lecturer and a Fellow. She was Professor of Classics at Nottingham University until 2017, when she was appointed Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Arts and Humanities at Coventry University. She works on Greek tragedy, mostly Euripides, and Greek literature under the Roman Empire, mostly Plutarch. She believes strongly in the power of Classics to change lives for the better.
Vassiliki Kolocotroni
Vassiliki Kolocotroni is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Glasgow. She works on international modernism, classical reception and travel, and is the co-editor of Hotel Modernisms, The Edinburgh Dictionary of Modernism, Women Writing Greece: Essays on Hellenism, Orientalism and Travel, and In the Country of the Moon: British Women Travelers to Greece. Vassiliki is General Editor of the Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism and Co-Principal Editor of the Journal of Greek Media and Culture.
Ingela Nilsson
Ingela Nilsson is Professor of Greek and Byzantine Studies at Uppsala University. She is interested in the long tradition of Greek literature, the processes of translation and adaptation that such a tradition entrals, and storytelling in general. Recent publications include Writer and Occasion in Twelfth-Century Byzantium (2021) and Critical Storytelling: Experiences of Power Abuse in Academia (ed. with J. Hanson, 2022). Nilsson is currently editor (with David Ricks) of Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies.
Oliver Thomas
Oliver Thomas is an Associate Professor of Classics at the University of Nottingham. He is the author of The Agamemnon of Aeschylus: A Commentary for Students (Oxford 2011, with David Raeburn) and The Homeric Hymn to Hermes (Cambridge 2020), and numerous articles on ancient Greek literature. His current research focuses on ancient and medieval interpretation of the Iliad.
Sofka Zinovieff
Sofka Zinovieff was born in London and has lived for many years in Athens. She has written about Greece as an anthropologist (with a PhD from Cambridge), a journalist and an author. Her books include Eurydice Street: A Place in Athens, and the novel The House on Paradise Street. Athens Unpacked is her podcast documentary series.
www.sofkazinovieff.com