Profiling the Anglo-Hellenic League Runciman Award shortlist for 2026

In a series of posts over the coming month, we will highlight the seven outstanding titles shortlisted for the 2026 Runciman Award, beginning with Athens Tales, an anthology of modern and contemporary Greek short stories set in the capital city of Greece.

Published by Oxford University Press, and translated by Joshua Barley, Athens Tales is a portrait of Greece's capital through the city's own writers. The book is made up of eighteen short stories, in English translation, by different Greek authors, some of whom have never appeared before in English. Taking a roughly chronological course from the 1890s to the present day, the reader follows the history of Athens through its multiple transformations from a small town in the nineteenth century to a sprawling modern metropolis.

The tales bear witness to the major events of Athens' recent history - from the effects of the 1923 Population Exchange with Turkey, to Nazi Occupation in World War II, to post-war boom, to Economic Crisis. The stories have been chosen to give a representative sample of different eras of Greek writing, from 19th-century realism to postmodern fiction to detective fiction. As well as being a portrait of the city, the volume also serves as an introduction to the last one hundred and fifty years of Greek fiction writing.

Each story is accompanied by a black-and-white photograph contemporary with the story, some published for the first time, giving the reader a sense of the changing visual landscape of the city, as well as a visual counterpoint to the writing. The volume also includes a scholarly introduction, providing the literary and historical context of the stories, as well as notes and suggestions for further reading.

Joshua Barley read Classics at Oxford University and holds an M.A. in Modern Greek Literature from King’s College London. His translations of Michalis Ganas (with David Connolly), published by Yale University Press as A Greek Ballad (2019), were shortlisted for the Runciman Award and the London Hellenic Prize. His book Greek Folk Songs (Aiora Press, 2022) was shortlisted for the Greek State Prize for translation. He lives between Athens and Epirus.