Autumn Gleanings - Corfu Memoirs & Poems - Theodore Stephanides

Theodore Stephanides (1896-1983) was a polymath. He had an international reputation as a scientist (he was a medical doctor, a naturalist and an astronomer), but he was also a poet and a translator. Stephanides was in India, but came to Corfu with his family as a child, and it was there, many years later, that he encountered the Durrell family, who moved to Corfu in 1935.

Lawrence Durrell, who was to write The Alexandria Quartet, became a close friend of Stephanides and his collaborator, while Gerald Durrell, who was introduced by Stephanides to the beauties and mysteries of the natural world, went on to become one of the most distinguished zoologists of his day. In My Family and Other Animals, Gerald presents a lively portrait of Stephanides.

Complete for the first time in Autumn Gleanings are Stephanides' memoirs of his meetings with Lawrence Durrell in Corfu, Athens and Egypt, in the years 1935-44, together with his last (and hitherto unpublished) collection of poems. Both the memoirs and the poems are, by turns, witty, perceptive, erudite and compassionate. Included too is a brief biography of Stephanides by Richard Pine.