At its meeting on 7 April, the judging panel for the Anglo-Hellenic League Runciman Award 2022 agreed its short list for this year’s competition.

Out of the 23 books selected by the judges in January to form their long list, the panel has now picked eight books, published in 2021, as their short list for the final round of judging.

Peter Frankopan, chair of judges, said: “This has been an exceptionally rich and varied year for the Runciman Award. We have read some astonishingly ambitious books, some covering many thousands of years of history, others re-telling familiar tales in extraordinary new ways, and others still that have captured our hearts, minds and imaginations. The judges deliberated for a long time to select this short list, and we wished we could have honoured even more books this time. We are yet to discuss which of the eight books might win; but we are thrilled by the range and breadth of writers and scholars represented in our short list – taking us from the Siege of Troy through the Byzantine era right up to the present day.”

The Runciman Award is given by The Anglo-Hellenic League annually for the best book published for the first time in English in the previous year about Greece or on a Greek subject.

The eight short-listed titles are set out below, in alphabetical order (by author):

Author/ Translator	Title	Press	Period	Genre	RRP
Nektaria Anastasiadou	A Recipe for Daphne	American University of Cairo Press	Modern	Fiction	£10.99
Pat Barker	The Women of Troy	Penguin (Hamish Hamilton)	Antiquity	Fiction	£18.99
Jeffrey Beneker & Craig Gibson (trans.)	The Byzantine Sinbad (by Michael Andreopoulos)	Harvard UP	Byzantium	Translation	£31.95
Ian Collins	John Craxton: A Life of Gifts	Yale UP	Modern	Biography	£25
Michael Llewellyn-Smith	Venizelos: The Making of a Greek Statesman, 1864-1914	C Hurst & Co	Modern	Biography	£30
Mark Mazower	The Greek Revolution: 1821 and the Making of Modern Europe	Penguin (Allen Lane)	Modern	History	£30
Ruth Padel	Daughters of the Labyrinth	Little Brown	Modern	Fiction	£18.99
Dimitris Tziovas	Greece from Junta to Crisis: Modernization, Transition and Diversity	Bloomsbury (I.B. Tauris)	Modern	Cultural history	£85

The judges for the Award in 2022 are:

Prof. Peter Frankopan (chair)

Dr Dionysis Kapsalis

Prof. Naoíse Mac Sweeney 

Prof. Judith Mossman

Dr Sofka Zinovieff 

The announcement of the winner and award ceremony will take place on Monday 13 June, at 7pm, in the Great Hall of King’s College London, on the Strand.

The award, which is worth £10,000, is sponsored by the A.C. Laskaridis Charitable Foundation and the A.G. Leventis Foundation.

Further information about the League and about the award is available at www.anglohellenicleague.org and www.runcimanaward.org.

John Kittmer (Award Administrator)

  for the Council of

The Anglo-Hellenic League

8 April 2022

runciman@anglohellenicleague.org