An Evening of Anglo-Hellenic Art & Poetry was 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.
After a Welcome from the Chair of the Council of the League, Dr John Kittmer, A.E. Stallings, Winner of the Runciman Award 2023 read extracts from This Afterlife: Selected Poems (Carcanet 2022), followed by Ian Collins, Winner of the Runciman Award 2022 who read from John Craxton: A Life of Gifts (Yale UP 2021). The evening ended with the poet, David Harsent, reading selected excerpts from A Broken Man in Flower: Versions of Yannis Ritsos (Bloodaxe 2023).
A reception hosted by the British Embassy followed at which our Chair, Dr John Kittmer, addressed the audience.
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 Athanasios C. Laskaridis Charitable Foundation and the A. G. Leventis Foundation.
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.
