JUDGES ANNOUNCE THE LONG LIST FOR THE ANGLO-HELLENIC LEAGUE RUNCIMAN AWARD 2026
The judging panel for the Anglo-Hellenic League Runciman Award, given annually for the best book in English about Greece or inspired by a Hellenic theme, has agreed a long list of 20 books for the competition in 2026.
Out of 43 nominations submitted for the Award, the judges selected 20 to form their long list. The list, which covers books published globally in English in 2025, embraces a wide range of genres including fiction and poetry, literary biography, history, the history of ideas and travel writing. The books selected span Hellenic experience from Homer until today.
The full long list of 20 titles is below.
The Award Ceremony for the Anglo-Hellenic League Runciman Award 2026 is scheduled to be held in the Great Hall of King’s College London on Tuesday 9 June 2026, at 7pm. Details of the award ceremony and of the short list will be announced in due course.
The Anglo-Hellenic League Runciman Award is sponsored by the Athanasios C. Laskaridis Charitable Foundation and the A.G. Leventis Foundation. The value of the prize to the winner is £10,000.
Long list
Fiction and poetry
Joshua Barley (tr.), Athens Tales (Oxford University Press)
Jonathan Buckley, One Boat (Fitzcarraldo)
Evan Jones, Men of the Same Name (Carcanet)
Daniel Mendelsohn (tr.), Homer The Odyssey (Chicago University Press)
Luke Icarus Simon, The Art in my Palm (Sterling)
Brian Sneeden (tr.), Phoebe Giannisi, Goatsong (Fitzcarraldo)
Non-Fiction
Richard Calis, The Discovery of Ottoman Greece: Knowledge, Encounter, and Belief in the Mediterranean World of Martin Crusius (Harvard University Press)
Agnes Callard, Open Socrates: The Case for a Philosophical Life (Penguin)
Michael Haag, Larry A New Biography of Lawrence Durrell, 1912–1945 (Profile)
Edith Hall, Epic of the Earth: Reading Homer’s "Iliad" in the Fight for a Dying World (Yale University Press)
Julian Hoffman, Lifelines: Searching for Home in the Mountains of Greece (Elliot and Thompson)
James Howard-Johnston, Byzantium in a Changing World (Oxford University Press)
Peter Jeffreys & Gregory Jusdanis, Alexandrian Sphinx: The Hidden Life of Constantine Cavafy (Simon and Schuster)
Carolina López-Ruiz, Greek Mythology: From Creation to First Humans (Oxford University Press)
Sean Mathews, The New Byzantines: The Rise of Greece and Return of the Near East (Hurst)
James Romm, Plato and the Tyrant: The Fall of Greece’s Greatest Dynasty and the Making of a Philosophic Masterpiece (Norton)
Hugo Shakeshaft, Beauty and the Gods: A History from Homer to Plato (Princeton University Press)
A.E. Stallings, Frieze Frame: How Poets, Painters, and their Friends Framed the Debate Around Elgin and the Marbles of the Parthenon (Paul Dry Books)
Harry Tanner, The Queer thing about Sin. Why the West Came to Hate Queer Love (Bloomsbury Continuum)
Lea Ypi, Indignity: A Life Reimagined (Penguin)