History & Aims

The Award began in 1986 and since then various private sources, business and institutions with an interest in the promotion of Greek culture have provided generous sponsorship. The current joint sponsors are the Athanasios C. Laskaridis Charitable Foundation and the A. G. Leventis Foundation.

Judges for 2025

Esther Eidinow

Esther Eidinow is Professor of Ancient History at the University of Bristol. Her research focuses on ancient Greek culture, especially religion, magic and myth, with particular interest in interdisciplinary approaches. Her publications include Envy, Poison, and Death: Women on Trial in Classical Athens (Oxford, 2016), and Cognitive Approaches to Ancient Religious Experience (Cambridge, 2022). She is series editor of Ancient Religion and Cognition (Cambridge) and Ancient Environments (Bloomsbury). She is our newest judge, joining the panel for the 2025 competition.

Vassiliki Kolocotroni

Vassiliki Kolocotroni is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Glasgow. She works on international modernism, classical reception and travel, and is the co-editor of Hotel Modernisms, The Edinburgh Dictionary of Modernism, Women Writing Greece: Essays on Hellenism, Orientalism and Travel,  and In the Country of the Moon: British Women Travelers to Greece. Vassiliki is General Editor of the Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism and Co-Principal Editor of the Journal of Greek Media and Culture. She joined the panel first for the 2023 competition.

Ingela Nilsson

Ingela Nilsson is Professor of Greek and Byzantine Studies at Uppsala University. She is interested in the long tradition of Greek literature, the processes of translation and adaptation that such a tradition entrals, and storytelling in general. Recent publications include Writer and Occasion in Twelfth-Century Byzantium (2021) and Critical Storytelling: Experiences of Power Abuse in Academia (ed. with J. Hanson, 2022). Nilsson is currently editor (with David Ricks) of Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies. She has served on the panel since the 2024 competition.

Oliver Thomas

Oliver Thomas is an Associate Professor of Classics at the University of Nottingham. He is the author of The Agamemnon of Aeschylus: A Commentary for Students (Oxford 2011, with David Raeburn) and The Homeric Hymn to Hermes (Cambridge 2020), and numerous articles on ancient Greek literature. His current research focuses on ancient and medieval interpretation of the Iliad. He joined the panel first for the 2023 competition.

Rules and competition entry

The cycle of the competition is broadly the same every year:

• by mid-October: the competition is launched. Publishers on our database are notified automatically by e-mail and are sent a copy of the rules of the competition and a form to nominate books. Information is also posted on the news pages of our website.

• mid-December: the deadline for publishers’ nominations closes.

• early January: the judges establish and announce their long list. The administrator requests publishers to send copies of long-listed books to the judges and administrator.

• mid-April: the judges select and announce their short list.

• mid-June: the chair of judges announces the winner at an award ceremony in London.

If you are a publisher, wish to be notified automatically about the competition and are not currently on our database, please send the following information to the Award Administrator: a) name of publisher, b) full name of official contact, c) one or, at most, two e-mail addresses of official contact(s).

Please note that we do not accept nominations by authors or hold authors’ details on our database, except when the author self-publishes.

We do not accept unsolicited copies of books for entry into the competition. Books must first be nominated by publishers, when the window for doing so is open (from the competition launch in October to the deadline for receipt of nominations in December).