This Afterlife: Selected Poems by A.E. Stallings has won the Anglo-Hellenic League Runciman Award 2023!

The Anglo-Hellenic League Runciman Award is an annual literary award for the best books about Greece or on a Greek subject, with the shortlisted titles spanning Hellenic experience from antiquity until the modern day.

Alicia's win was announced by chair of judges Prof. Peter Frankopan at the awards ceremony on Monday 19th June, held at the Great Hall of King's College London. It marks the first time in the Anglo-Hellenic League's history that the Runciman Award has been given to a book of poetry.

Congratulations Alicia!

Raised in Atlanta, Georgia, A.E. Stallings lives in Athens, Greece. Her poems come out of life's dailiness – as a wife, mother, teacher, an expatriate between languages, a brilliant translator of ancient and modern Greek. She also translates Latin, her most notable large work being the Penguin Lucretius, translated into fourteeners.

In This Afterlife, current events and ancient history are always rubbing shoulders, where she explores motherhood, marriage, mortality and mythology with her trademark clarity and playfulness.

Being a poet in Greece entails, for her, being part of that world. She was among volunteers helping refugees as they arrived in Greece, and their experience haunted her to write, 'My love, I'm grateful tonight / Our listing bed isn't a raft / Precariously adrift / As we dodge the coast guard light...' The sharp quatrain commends the observation to memory. The poems, without self-indulgence or confession, are intimate as they address 'My love', children or friends.