An excerpt from The Afterlives of Greek Sculpture: Interaction, Transformation, and Destruction by Rachel Kousser

5th June 2018 by RuncimanAward

In the five centuries between the Persian wars and the death of Cleopatra, the Greeks not only created some of the ancient world’s best known monumental sculptures, but also gave them complex and at times contentious afterlives. As visual and written sources attest, the Greeks washed, perfumed, and polished statues; they poured libations upon them … Read more

An interview with Emily Wilson, translator of Homer’s Odyssey – Part 2

24th May 2018 by RuncimanAward

Part 2 of the interview. Read Part 1 here. You are – famously by now – the first woman to translate the Odyssey into English. Your reviewers have tended to focus on that, either to praise your reading of the Odyssey which ‘exposes centuries of masculinist readings of the poem’, or to single out … Read more

An interview with Emily Wilson, translator of Homer’s Odyssey – Part 1

23rd May 2018 by RuncimanAward

Emily, thank you for taking the time to talk to us about your book. What prompted you to tackle a work that has been translated so many times before? Was it your love of the Odyssey, the challenge, a desire to convey Homer’s message using a different voice, or a desire to remedy shortcomings in … Read more

An interview with Bettany Hughes, author of Istanbul: a Tale of Three Cities

17th May 2018 by RuncimanAward

Bettany, thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us about your book, Istanbul: A Tale of Three Cities. What drove you to write about the city? Byzantion, Constantinople, Istanbul: why has the city always been such an important place? How did you go about researching it, and who is your book for? … Read more

An excerpt from Bettany Hughes’s entry, Istanbul: a Tale of Three Cities

16th May 2018 by RuncimanAward

INTRODUCTION

Though all other cities have their periods of government and are subject
to the decays of time, Constantinople alone seems to claim a kind of
immortality and will continue to be a city as long as humanity shall live
either to inhabit or rebuild it. Pierre Gilles, ad 1550

On 4 February 1939 the BBC transmitted an audio-recording of W. B. Yeats’s poem ‘Sailing to Byzantium’. This was the broadcaster’s tribute to the firebrand Irishman who had died seven days before. Crackling and hissing, the clipped, RP Queen’s English hangs somewhere between the sublime and the sinister, the recording itself a broken reminder of what the great city of Byzantium had and has become.