The Anglo-Hellenic League

Dedicated to promoting Anglo-Greek understanding and friendship, through charitable and cultural work. 

An Evening of Anglo-Hellenic Art & Poetry

The Gardens of The Municipal Gallery of Corfu, 

Old Palace of SS Michael & George, Corfu Town 

Thursday 21 September 2023, at 6.30pm (local time) 

The League’s annual event in Greece will take place on Corfu under the auspices of the Corfu Literary Festival, in the gardens of The Municipal Gallery of Corfu at the Old Palace in Corfu Town. Our warm thanks go to the Corfu Literary Festival and The Municipal Gallery of Corfu for extending their hospitality to us, and to our sponsors, the A. C. Laskaridis Charitable Foundation and the A. G. Leventis Foundation.

The event is an opportunity to celebrate recent writing in English about Greece and to introduce to an audience in Greece the two most recent winners of the Anglo-Hellenic League Runciman Award.

The programme is:

Welcome (6.30pm) 

John Kittmer

Chair of the Council of the League

Talks and Readings (6.40pm-8pm) 

A.E. Stallings

Winner of the Runciman Award 2023

This Afterlife: Selected Poems (Carcanet 2022)

Ian Collins

Winner of the Runciman Award 2022

John Craxton: A Life of Gifts (Yale UP 2021)

David Harsent

A Broken Man in Flower: Versions of Yannis Ritsos (Bloodaxe 2023)

Entry is free though registration (by 19 September) is required here. The event will not be livestreamed or recorded.

As of 4 September, this event is sold out. If you have already registered and know you will not be able to attend, please 'return' your ticket through Eventbrite.

Notes on the participants:

A.E. Stallings is an American poet, critic, and translator who lives in Athens. She has published five volumes of poetry, most recently This Afterlife: Selected Poems (Carcanet). Her most recent verse translation is the (illustrated) pseudo-Homeric The Battle Between the Frogs and the Mice (Paul Dry Books), which was longlisted for the Anglo-Hellenic League Runciman Award 2020/1; for Penguin Classics she has published a translation of Hesiod Works and Days, which was shortlisted for the Anglo-Hellenic League Runciman Award 2019, and a translation of Lucretius. She has received fellowships from the Guggenheim, USA Artists, and MacArthur Foundations, and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. Since 2015, she has led a poetry workshop for refugee women (from Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq, Egypt, Iran, Congo, etc.) in Athens at the Melissa Network for Migrant Women. On 16 June 2023, it was announced that she has been elected the next Professor of Poetry at the University of Oxford.

Ian Collins is an independent art writer and curator. He has written monographs on Rose Hilton, Joan Leigh Fermor and John McLean and has worked with galleries from the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven, to the Sainsbury Centre in Norwich. He co-curated the popular 2017-18 exhibition Charmed Lives in Greece: Ghika, Craxton, Leigh Fermor, which toured from the A.G. Leventis Gallery in Nicosia to the Benaki Museum in Athens and the British Museum in London. Now he is curating John Craxton’s centenary touring exhibition: John Craxton: A Greek Soul. The exhibition has run in Athens, Chania and Istanbul, and will be at the Pallant House Gallery, Chichester from October 2023 until April 2024. 

David Harsent has published thirteen volumes of poetry. Legion won the Forward Prize. Night was thrice shortlisted in the UK and won the Griffin Poetry Prize. Fire Songs won the T.S. Eliot Prize. A new collection, Loss, appeared in 2020. His most recent volume, A Broken Man in Flower: Versions of Yannis Ritsos, was published in 2023. Harsent has collaborated with several composers, most often with Sir Harrison Birtwistle. He holds several fellowships, including Fellowship of the Royal Society of Literature and Fellowship of the Hellenic Authors Society. He is Professor Emeritus at the University of Roehampton.

A.E. STALLINGS WINS THE ANGLO-HELLENIC LEAGUE RUNCIMAN AWARD 2023

FOR 

THIS AFTERLIFE: SELECTED POEMS 

We are delighted to announce that the winner of the Anglo-Hellenic League Runciman Award 2023 is A.E. Stallings for This Afterlife: Selected Poems (Manchester: Carcanet 2022). 

Announcing the result of this year’s competition on Monday 19 June at a ceremony in the Great Hall of King’s College London, in the presence of the League’s Chief Patron & President, HRH Prince Michael of Kent, and a large audience in the hall and online, Prof. Peter Frankopan, the chair of judges, said:

This was a formidable year with a stunning set of entries. The range of scholarship, creativity and interests in all things Greek – from ideas of the body to those about maths, from aesthetics to myths. We were thrilled to shortlist two books of poetry, and genuinely excited to announce A.E. Stallings and This Afterlife: Selected Poems as the winner of the Runciman Award 2023. This is a sparkling, joyful and glorious collection. We are so pleased, too, that this is the first time the award has been won by a poet – Homer and his many peers will be smiling at our choice.

The winner of the Award, Alicia Stallings, said: 

I am stunned at this news. I was thrilled making the short list with a book of poems, and among such excellent contenders; I didn’t really think poetry would have a strong chance. A selected poems is a lifetime’s work—and in this case, it turns out, a lifetime of creative engaging with Greek mythology, Greek history, modern Greece, and the continuum that is Greek. I couldn’t be more heartened by this honour and thrilled with this affirmation, for myself, but also for poetry, and those very Greek goddesses, the Muses.  

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 announcement of the winner of the Anglo-Hellenic League Runciman Award 2023 was made on Monday 19 June, 7pm at King’s College London, which co-hosted the event with the Anglo-Hellenic League. Prof. Dame Mary Beard (University of Cambridge) gave the keynote address on ‘How do we best argue for Classics?’. Prof. Peter Frankopan reviewed the longlisted and shortlisted books on behalf of the panel of judges and announced the winner. The winner presented her book with a short talk and readings. Addresses were also given by Prof. Marion Thain (KCL), Dr John Kittmer (the League) and Prof. Gonda Van Steen (KCL).

A recording of the Award Ceremony is available on our YouTube channel (see below). 

The Anglo-Hellenic League Runciman Award is sponsored by the A. C. Laskaridis Charitable Foundation and the A. G. Leventis Foundation.

Photo gallery © Julian Anderson