New Nobel winner Anne Carson’s playful, deeply intelligent work riffs off and reinvents ancient classics – and often lands with breathtaking emotional force.
Articles on Sappho
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Carson’s Nobel Prize in Literature celebrates a writer whose work returns to antiquity as an unfinished reservoir of images, voices and fragments capable of unsettling contemporary experience.
Americans of all stripes have long embraced the culture of the ancient Mediterranean, using ancient ideals to navigate a new world.
Selby Wynn Schwartz’s inventive, poetic reimagining of lives like those of Virginia Woolf and Sarah Bernhardt – against a backdrop of Sappho – has just been longlisted for the Booker Prize.
In 2014, reports of a new discovery of Sappho’s poems were remarkable. New research argues the papyrus had a fabricated backstory.
Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper were aunt and niece as well as lovers who published under a male pseudonym.
Women have been there in their imaginations.
Sappho sang of desire, passion and love – mostly directed towards women. As new fragments of her work are found, a fuller picture of her is emerging, but she remains the most mysterious of ancient poets.
Ancient poems were accompanied by a musical instrument called the lyre – from which we get the word ‘lyric’. ‘Literature’ and ‘poetry’ are categories of our own making - so moving beyond them in a major award seems long overdue.
It’s a kind of literary miracle. Fragments of two new poems by Ancient Greek poet Sappho have been discovered, making it possible for us to be among the first people to read these texts for more than 1,000…
Top contributors
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Honorary Professor of Classics and Ancient History, School of Historical and Philosophical Inquiry, The University of Queensland
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Professor of Writing and Literature, Deakin University
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Lecturer in Classical Studies, The Open University
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Lecturer in Nineteenth and Twentieth-Century Literature, Loughborough University
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Associate Professor of Classics, University of Manitoba
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Senior Lecturer in English, Loughborough University
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Lecturer in English, Loughborough University
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Professor, RMIT University
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Post-Doctoral Curatorial Fellow, Bowdoin College
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Senior Lecturer, Discipline of English and Writing, University of Sydney
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Professor, Canadian and Cultural Studies, Stockholm University