Friday, June 10, 2011
Molly Greene’s Catholic Pirates and Greek Merchants: A Maritime History of the Early Modern Mediterranean (by Princeton University Press) and Emily Greenwood’s Afro-Greeks: Dialogues Between Anglophone Caribbean Literature and Classics in the 20th Century (by Oxford University Press) are the joint winners of this year's Runciman Award, which was presented at a special ceremony, organized by the Anglo-Hellenic League at London’s Hellenic Centre on June 8.
In announcing the winners on May 20, Karim Arafat, chairman of the jury, said that the judges were "unanimously enthusiastic" about Molly Greene’s Catholic Pirates and Greek Merchants, "seeing it as very scholarly and well-documented, with new thinking on Orthodoxy, Ottomans and Rome and opening up many new areas for future research."
Emily Greenwood’s Afro-Greeks he described as "a highly original book, thoroughly academic but appealing also to the general reader, not least through its consideration of familiar writers such as James, Walcott and Naipaul."
The Runciman Award, first conceived in 1983 during Lord Jellicoe’s chairmanship of the Anglo-Hellenic League, was presented for the first time in 1986 and named in honour of Sir Steven Runciman, the eminent Byzantine scholar and the League’s longest serving Chairman. It is given each year for a work wholly or mainly about some aspect of Greece or the world of Hellenism, published in English in its first edition in the previous year.
