Peter Jeffreys – författare

A gripping and revealing new biography of one of the greatest of modern poets, the queer, Greek-Egyptian Constantine Cavafy, whose admirers have ranged from E.M. Forster, T.S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf to Jackie Onassis, Leonard Cohen and Stephen Fry.Shortlisted for the Anglo-Hellenic League Runciman Award Shortlisted for the International Hellenic Prize'A deeply researched and engaging biography… Jeffreys and Jusdanis brilliantly recreate Cavafy’s world’ - Guardian‘A nuanced and original portrait’ - Literary Review‘A richly detailed and clear-sighted account of Cavafy’s life and work’ - Spectator'Melancholy and majesty. . . [an] extraordinary life story' - New StatesmanIn this illuminating book, Peter Jeffreys and Gregory Jusdanis reveal Cavafy as a troubled, brilliant poet who sacrificed love for his art and changed the course of world poetry. Alexandrian Sphinx chronicles the extraordinary story of his family, the vicissitudes of their fortunes, and their eventual poverty when they left Egypt and moved to Liverpool, London and Istanbul. As the poet reached adulthood, his story centred on his beloved Alexandria, the city that nourished his imagination and became for him a metaphor of both his poetry and modern life. Deep archival research uncovers the poet’s relationships with his teenage companions, his friends of middle age, and the individuals whom in later life he enlisted in his steadfast pursuit of fame.Alexandrian Sphinx tells not only of Cavafy’s life but of his work and his artistic journey, from his early poetic experiments to his startling reinvention in middle age, when he renounced much of what he had written and developed a radical new poetics. Erotic, philosophical, and linguistically suggestive, this widely imitated yet singular style is now recognized and revered as Cavafian.

A gripping and revealing new biography of one of the greatest of modern poets, the queer, Greek-Egyptian Constantine Cavafy, whose admirers have ranged from E.M. Forster, T.S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf to Jackie Onassis, Leonard Cohen and Stephen Fry.Shortlisted for the Anglo-Hellenic League Runciman AwardShortlisted for the International Hellenic Prize'A deeply researched and engaging biography… Jeffreys and Jusdanis brilliantly recreate Cavafy’s world’ - Guardian‘A nuanced and original portrait’ - Literary Review‘A richly detailed and clear-sighted account of Cavafy’s life and work’ - Spectator'Melancholy and majesty. . . [an] extraordinary life story' - New StatesmanIn this illuminating book, Peter Jeffreys and Gregory Jusdanis reveal Cavafy as a troubled, brilliant poet who sacrificed love for his art and changed the course of world poetry. Alexandrian Sphinx chronicles the extraordinary story of his family, the vicissitudes of their fortunes, and their eventual poverty when they left Egypt and moved to Liverpool, London and Istanbul. As the poet reached adulthood, his story centred on his beloved Alexandria, the city that nourished his imagination and became for him a metaphor of both his poetry and modern life. Deep archival research uncovers the poet’s relationships with his teenage companions, his friends of middle age, and the individuals whom in later life he enlisted in his steadfast pursuit of fame.Alexandrian Sphinx tells not only of Cavafy’s life but of his work and his artistic journey, from his early poetic experiments to his startling reinvention in middle age, when he renounced much of what he had written and developed a radical new poetics. Erotic, philosophical, and linguistically suggestive, this widely imitated yet singular style is now recognized and revered as Cavafian.

A gay poet-historian writing from and about the edges of empiresKnown as a preeminent poet of queer male desire, C. P. Cavafy lived most of his life as part of the Greek minority community in Alexandria, Egypt. He was inspired by the possibilities offered by peripheries, whether sexual, geographic, or historical. Volumes of his poems, widely translated into English, give anglophone readers access to his distinctive mixture of irony and tenderness, directness and subtlety.This volume will help instructors introduce students to Cavafy's works and explore them from many angles with the help of the extensive archives now available. Essays address teaching Cavafy both as a poetic historian of the Hellenistic, Roman, and Byzantine worlds and through the lens of postcoloniality. They also explore how he interpreted classical Greek works and how his work has been interpreted by composers, poets, and readers within and beyond Greece and the Greek diaspora.This volume contains discussion of the following texts: Charles Baudelaire's The Flowers of Evil; Anne Carson's If Not, Winter; C. P. Cavafy's essay "Give Back the Elgin Marbles"; Cavafy's poems "Caesarion," "For Ammonis, Who Died at 29, in 610 A.D.," "The God Abandons Anthony," "The Horses of Achilles," "In the Year 200 B.C.," "Ithaca," "Julian Noticing Negligence," "King Claudius," "27 June 1906, 2 p.m.," "Waiting for the Barbarians," and "Walls"; Mark Doty's My Alexandria; Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria Quartet; E. M. Forster's Pharos and Pharillon and Alexandria; Edward Gibbon's The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; Mahmud Tahir Haqqi's The Maiden of Dinshway; Homer's Iliad; Edwar al-Kharrat's Girls of Alexandria and City of Saffron; Robert Liddell's Unreal City; Ibrahim Abdel Meguld's No One Sleeps in Alexandria; Plutarch's Life of Caesar; and Shakespeare's Hamlet and Julius Caesar. The volume also contains discussion of the following musical compositions: Constantine Koukias's The Barbarians, Ron McFarland's String Quartet No. 2 (Windows), and Dimitris Papadimitriou's C. P. Cavafy: An Alexandrian Writing on an Alexandrian. The volume discusses these artworks: Gustave Moreau's The Apparition and Jacob and the Angel, Dante Gabriel Rossetti's The Blessed Damozel and A Sea-Spell, and James McNeill Whistler's Nocturne in Blue and Silver.

A gay poet-historian writing from and about the edges of empiresKnown as a preeminent poet of queer male desire, C. P. Cavafy lived most of his life as part of the Greek minority community in Alexandria, Egypt. He was inspired by the possibilities offered by peripheries, whether sexual, geographic, or historical. Volumes of his poems, widely translated into English, give anglophone readers access to his distinctive mixture of irony and tenderness, directness and subtlety.This volume will help instructors introduce students to Cavafy's works and explore them from many angles with the help of the extensive archives now available. Essays address teaching Cavafy both as a poetic historian of the Hellenistic, Roman, and Byzantine worlds and through the lens of postcoloniality. They also explore how he interpreted classical Greek works and how his work has been interpreted by composers, poets, and readers within and beyond Greece and the Greek diaspora.This volume contains discussion of the following texts: Charles Baudelaire's The Flowers of Evil; Anne Carson's If Not, Winter; C. P. Cavafy's essay "Give Back the Elgin Marbles"; Cavafy's poems "Caesarion," "For Ammonis, Who Died at 29, in 610 A.D.," "The God Abandons Anthony," "The Horses of Achilles," "In the Year 200 B.C.," "Ithaca," "Julian Noticing Negligence," "King Claudius," "27 June 1906, 2 p.m.," "Waiting for the Barbarians," and "Walls"; Mark Doty's My Alexandria; Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria Quartet; E. M. Forster's Pharos and Pharillon and Alexandria; Edward Gibbon's The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; Mahmud Tahir Haqqi's The Maiden of Dinshway; Homer's Iliad; Edwar al-Kharrat's Girls of Alexandria and City of Saffron; Robert Liddell's Unreal City; Ibrahim Abdel Meguld's No One Sleeps in Alexandria; Plutarch's Life of Caesar; and Shakespeare's Hamlet and Julius Caesar. The volume also contains discussion of the following musical compositions: Constantine Koukias's The Barbarians, Ron McFarland's String Quartet No. 2 (Windows), and Dimitris Papadimitriou's C. P. Cavafy: An Alexandrian Writing on an Alexandrian. The volume discusses these artworks: Gustave Moreau's The Apparition and Jacob and the Angel, Dante Gabriel Rossetti's The Blessed Damozel and A Sea-Spell, and James McNeill Whistler's Nocturne in Blue and Silver.