Runciman Award shortlist completes

The seventh book on the Anglo-Hellenic League’s Runciman Award is Goatsong, by Phoebe Giannisi and translated by Brian Sneeden.

The ancient Greek word for tragedy (τραγωδία) is a compound of goat (τράγος)and song (ᾠδή). In Phoebe Giannisi's Goatsong, the seam that connects humanand animal, myths and history, is the body. In Giannisi’s language, translated into English by Brian Sneeden, life obeysmyth. A man places a screaming cicada in his mouth, reminding us of a scene from Plato’s Phaedrus, where Socrates claims cicadas to have been humans who became entranced by the invention of singing, and didn’t stop to eat or drink. When the goddess Thetis dips her newborn son, Achilles, into the River Styx to protect all but his famous heel where her hand grips, we’re told ‘the place of the mother’s grip / is the mark of death.’ Adjacent to the mythical setting is the material, where the rumination of goats, their digestive cycle –chewing, swallowing, then recalling food back into the mouth to be reconsidered – begins after weaning, and is lain alongside how we think: ‘from the moment of separation / from the mother / they ruminate.’ In these lyric enactments, all is transformative and transformed; territories of land, the body and history are blurred, and nothing is still. From Homer to Donna Haraway, Derrida to state archives, klephtic ballads and rebetiko, to Parmenides and Giannisi’s dog, Ivan, the many human and animal voices of Goatsong form an incantatory lyricism and layered engagement unique in literature.

Brian Sneeden is a poet, translator, and editor. He is the author of Year of the Labyrinth (forthcoming from Carnegie Mellon, 2026) and Last City (Carnegie Mellon, 2018). His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Poetry, Poetry Review, and other magazines, and has received the Iowa Review Award in Poetry, the Gulf Coast Barthelme Prize, and the Indiana Review 1/2K Prize. Translations of his poetry have been published internationally in Arabic, Italian, Modern Greek and Serbian. He is the translator of four collections of poetry, including Phoebe Giannisi’s Chimera (New Directions, 2024), a finalist for the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation and shortlisted for the National Translation Award in Poetry, and most recently, GOATSONG (Fitzcarraldo,2025), which was selected as a Poetry Book Society Translation Choice. His translations of poetry from the Modern Greek have received a NEA LiteratureT ranslation Fellowship, the World Literature Today Translation Award for Poetry, the Constantinides Memorial Translation Prize, a PEN/Heim Translation Grant and other recognitions. He is a senior lecturer in creative writing and publishing at Manchester Metropolitan University, where he directs the Manchester Translation Series.