The Runciman Prize 2023

 

… and the Winner is …

 

The Runciman Prize is an annual award made by the Anglo-Hellenic League for a book published in English and dealing with Greece and Hellenism. There is a prize of £10,000.
 
… and the Winner is …
 
AE Stallings for her poetry collection This Afterlife published by Carcanet Poetry. It is the first time a poetry book has won the Runciman Prize. Usually, the prize goes to a history book. The award was made at a ceremony in London on 19 June. June has been a wonderful month for Alicia Stallings; at the start of the month, she was named as the Oxford University Professor of Poetry, following her election by the graduates of the university.
 
Alicia Stallings was born in Georgia, USA, but she has lived in Athens since 1999. She is married to the Greek journalist John Psaropoulos. She has degrees in Classics from the universities of Georgia and Oxford. She has translated Hesiod’s Works and Days, and Greek mythology and history is a theme of several of her poems.
 
The Afterlife is a selection of her earlier poems, together with some new ones.  Her earlier collections include Archaic Smile (1999), Hapax (2006), Olives (2012) and Like (2018). A notable feature of Alicia Stallings’ poetry is that she is a ‘form poet’: many of her poems have a rhyme scheme and have a strict metre, or beat. In English poetry, these features fell out of fashion in the last century but Stallings uses them with a light touch.
 
She says “Rhyme frees the poet from what he wants to say.” By which she means, a poet may start writing a poem with a clear idea in mind, but because (s)he needs to work with the requirements of rhyme and metre, the poem may develop in ways the poet had not intended and may, in fact, become more interesting or may say what the poet really intended to say without realising it.
 
Here is a verse from Memorial (Mnemosyno) which appears in This Afterlife but first appeared in Like published by Farrar, Strauss and Giroud:
 
                   You’d lost your father’s grave,
                   We wandered row by row and plot by plot.
                   And it was hot
                   Under stiff cypress shade, the stillness drowned
                   By a lone insect’s corrugated sound.
 
Richard Devereux