{"title":"Runciman Award 2026 Long list","description":"","products":[{"product_id":"the-odyssey-1","title":"Homer The Odyssey","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan\u003eWith his Odyssey, best-selling author and classicist Daniel Mendelsohn has created a momentous new work, hailed by classicists and poets alike – a translation to stand with those of E. V. Rieu and Robert Fagles.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cspan\u003eSetting aside the streamlining, modernizing approach of many recent translations, Mendelsohn artfully reproduces the epic’s formal qualities – meter, enjambment, alliteration, assonance – and in so doing restores to Homer’s master work its archaic grandeur. His expansive six-beat line, far closer to the original than that of other recent translations, allows him to capture each of Homer’s verses line for line, without sacrificing the amplitude and shadings of the original. 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Through this unprecedented reading of Homer’s Iliad, the award-winning classicist Edith Hall examines how this foundational text both documents the environmental practices of the ancient Greeks and betrays an awareness of the dangers posed by the destruction of the natural landscape. Underlying Homer’s account of brutal military operations, alliances, and cataclysmic struggle is a palpable understanding that the direction in which humanity was headed could create a world that was uninhabitable.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cspan\u003e Hall provides unparalleled insight into the ancient origins of climate change and argues that the Iliad exposes the deepest contradictions behind the environmental problems we have created. Indeed, it is possible that some of the violence done to the environment throughout history has been authorized, if not exacerbated, by the celebration of the exploitation of nature in Homer’s poem. Drawing compelling analogies to contemporary poetry, literature, and film, Hall demonstrates that the Iliad, as a priceless document of the mindset of early humans, can help us understand the long history of ecological degradation and inspire activism to rescue our planet from disaster.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Hellenic Bookservice","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":55839526289787,"sku":null,"price":18.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0913\/6862\/0411\/files\/9780300275582.jpg?v=1760367630"},{"product_id":"lifelines-searching-for-home-in-the-mountains-of-greece","title":"Lifelines : Searching for Home in the Mountains of Greece","description":"\u003cp\u003eSet against the spectacular mountains and lakes of northern Greece, this remarkable book describes Julian and Julia's odyssey as they meet others on similar quests to find home, be they bears, pelicans or humans. 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Stallings has marshalled poetry, personal letters, paintings, a dubiously translated 1801 firman, newspaper clippings, parliamentary proceedings, a Greek political campaign, and other lore in this deliciously detailed and gossipy history of the Parthenon (AKA, Elgin) Marbles. Her narrative encompasses the removal of the Marbles from the Athenian Acropolis, their various misadventures before and after installation in the British Museum, from shipwreck to boxing matches, and the debate over their future and possible reunion in Greece.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan\u003eBringing fresh air to a stale debate, Frieze Frame explores the effect the Marbles have had on poets, writers, painters, actors, architects, and vice versa—how poets and painters, for instance, have framed the Marbles’ place in art and culture. 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Through these stories, follow the history of Athens through its multiple transformations, from a small town in the nineteenth century to a sprawling modern metropolis. Observe the major events of Athens's recent history - form the effects of the 1923 Population Exchange with Turkey, to Nazi Occupation in World War Two, to post-war boom, to Economic Crisis - through a literary lens. 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What if, Jones asks, instead of using the ancient world as a metaphor for modern life, the poet uses modern life as a metaphor for the ancient world? Working in this way between allegory and reality, the book rethinks poetry’s changing relationships to politics and our historical moment. A celebrated translator of Cavafy, here Jones blends translation (Goethe, Lucian of Samosata, Diogenes Laertius) with original poetry so that the world of his writing is distant yet familiar, both unequivocally our own and boldly inventive.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Hellenic Bookservice","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56092691005819,"sku":null,"price":12.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0913\/6862\/0411\/files\/MoTSN.jpg?v=1771497781"},{"product_id":"the-art-in-my-palm","title":"The Art in My Palm","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan\u003eAs the 51st anniversary of Cyprus's forced partition is marked in 2025, this timely and evocative novel sheds light on a legacy of colonisation, war, and resilience. 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In particular, Crusius’s work illuminates Western European views of the religious “other” within Christianity: the Greek Orthodox Christians living under Ottoman rule, a group both familiar and foreign.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cspan\u003eMany Western Europeans, including Crusius, developed narratives of Greek cultural and religious decline under Ottoman rule. Crusius’s records, however, reveal in exceptional detail how such stories developed. His interactions with his Greek Orthodox visitors, and with a vast network of correspondents, show that Greeks’ own narratives of hardship entwined in complex ways with Western Europeans’ orientalist views of the Ottoman world.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cspan\u003eThey also reflect the religious tensions that undergirded these exchanges, fuelled by Crusius’s fervent desire to spread Lutheran belief across Ottoman Greece and the wider world. 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