Poet and translator David Constantine's new translation A Bird Called Elaeus: poems for here and now from The Greek Anthology, published by Bloodaxe last November, is on the twenty-strong longlist for the Anglo-Hellenic League Runciman Award 2025. The longlist was announced on 13 January 2025, and includes books by Stephen Fry and Pat Barker, as well as by poet and fellow Bloodaxe Books translator Sasha Dugdale.

 

A Bird Called Elaeus is David Constantine’s seventh translation from Bloodaxe Books, who also publish his poetry. He was awarded The Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry for 2020, which was also the publication year of his eleventh poetry collection, Belongings.
 

The Anglo-Hellenic League Runciman Award, founded in 1986, is given annually for a book about Greece. Out of 56 nominations submitted for the Award, the judges selected 20 to form their longlist. The list covers books published globally in English in 2024, and spans Hellenic experience from antiquity until today. It includes books on history, archaeology, and the history of scholarship, plus memoirs, travel writing, novels, poetry and literary translation. The list is divided into two categories: Scholarly Writing and Creative Writing - A Bird Called Elaeus is included in the latter category.

The Award Ceremony for the Anglo-Hellenic League Runciman Award 2025 will be held in the Great Hall of King’s College London on Friday 13 June 2025, at 7pm. Details of the award ceremony and of the shortlist will be announced in due course. The winner will be awarded £10,000.

The Anglo-Hellenic League Runciman Award is sponsored by the Athanasios C. Laskaridis Charitable Foundation and the A.G. Leventis Foundation.

The judges for the Award in 2025 are: Dr Sokfa Zinovieff (chair), Prof. Esther Eidinow, Dr Vassiliki Kolocotroni, Prof. Ingela Nilsson, and Dr Oliver Thomas.

 

The full longlist can be seen on the Anglo-Hellenic League website here.

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For digital or print review copies of David Constantine's A Bird Called Elaeus: poems for here and now from The Greek Anthology, please email Christine Macgregor at publicity@bloodaxebooks.com.
 

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The Greek Anthology, marvellous salvage from the vast shipwreck of the Ancient World, is a collection of around 4500 poems composed over more than 1500 years by about 300 authors, a colossal continuity and variety from pre-classical times through Roman into Byzantine. For A Bird Called Elaeus – his small anthology of the vast original – David Constantine has gone not just to the renowned love poems but also to poems that treat man’s dealings with the earth, his work and trades there, the creatures other than himself who inhabit it and the divinities whose care it is.

 

A Bird Called Elaeus is David Constantine’s seventh translation from Bloodaxe, following three editions of Friedrich Hölderlin, and collections by Henri Michaux, Philippe Jaccottet and Hans Magnus Enzensberger, including two books for which he received the European Poetry Translation Prize and the Corneliu M. Popescu Prize for European Poetry Translation.

David Constantine was one of the first poets to be published by Bloodaxe, making his debut in 1980 with A Brightness to Cast Shadows, just two years after the press was founded. His Collected Poems (2004) was followed by three later collections: Nine Fathom Deep (2009), Elder (2014), and his eleventh collection, Belongings, in October 2020. Two months later he was announced as winner of The Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry, 2020.

 

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ONLINE REVIEW COVERAGE

 

London Grip, online 7 January 2025

A close reading of David Constantine’s new translation A Bird Called Elaeus went online in London Grip on 7 January 2025. Edmund Prestwich compares David’s translations of poems from The Greek Anthology with previously published versions.

'... I recommend it above all for the brilliance with which its translations bring those worlds and their poetry to life. I believe people with little or no existing interest in ancient Greek writing will be won over by these versions’ beauty and force.' – Edmund Prestwich, London Grip, on A Bird Called Elaeus

https://londongrip.co.uk/2025/01/london-grip-poetry-review-david-constantine-2/
 

 

The High Window, online 2 January 2025

 

 

Read here.

 

 

INTERVIEW WITH DAVID CONSTANTINE

 

Morning Star, online Tuesday 3 December 2024

 

An interview with poet and translator David Constantine about his translation A Bird Called Elaeus: poems for here and now from The Greek Anthology was featured in the Morning Star of 3 December 2024. 

 

Read online here.

 

 

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