Well done to Sasha Dugdale, who has been longlisted for the Anglo-Hellenic League Runciman Award 2025 with her collection The Strongbox!

The Anglo-Hellenic League Runciman Award is an annual literary award for the best books about Greece or on a Greek subject. The longlist, which covers books published globally in English in 2024, includes books on history, archaeology, and the history of scholarship, plus memoirs, travel writing, novels, poetry and literary translation. The books selected span Hellenic experience from antiquity until today.

The judges for the Award in 2025 are: Dr Sokfa Zinovieff (chair), Prof. Esther Eidinow, Dr Vassiliki Kolocotroni, Prof. Ingela Nilsson, and Dr Oliver Thomas. The Award ceremony is scheduled to be held in the Great Hall of King’s College London on Friday 13 June.

The full longlist can be found here.

Congratulations Sasha, and all the other longlisted writers and publishers!

'It began with the sun
appearing over the plane wing
supernatural orange
                                      but no light'

The Strongbox opens with the abduction of a woman to a foreign land and ends with the Rape of Europa.

Drawing in elements of Greek mythology, epic literature and recent history, this protean work gives shape to a cast of characters both ancient and modern, as they flit in and out of tales, their voices overlapping and interacting.

An unnamed girl is persuaded to leave behind her country and her childhood and travel to a warzone. Helen of Sparta, already trapped behind the walls of Ilium, is plagued by dreams about the coming conflict. Gods continue their manipulations, while mortals persist in defying the will of their gods.

Through a series of interconnected scenes and dialogues this singular work traces the role of myth in shaping our accounts of both history and contemporary events.