Mark Mazower wins Runciman Award, 2005
The Runciman Award for 2005, named in honor of the late Sir Steven Runcimanand awarded for a book on Greece or on some aspect of the Hellenic scene, has been won by Mark Mazower, the Anglo-Hellenic League announced last week. Mark Mazower, professor of History at Columbia University and Birkbeck College, London, prize-winning historian and a distinguished commentator on international affairs in the Financial Times and other media has won the Runciman Award for his book «Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims and Jews 1430 -1950,» published by Harper-Collins. Announcing the 5,000-pound award at a ceremony held at the Hellenic Centre, the chairman of the panel of judges, Dr Robin Barber, congratulated Professor Mazower for his remarkable history of Greece’s second most important city, from the fall of Byzantine Thessaloniki in 1430, which turned it into an Ottoman city, through the arrival of Sephardic Jews after their expulsion from most of Western Europe in the mid-16th century, the mixed society of the three great religions which coexisted peacefully throughout the Ottoman period, the Young Turk revolution – Salonica was the birthplace of Ataturk – to the exchange of populations, the departure of the city’s Muslims and finally to the tragic deportation of the city’s large Jewish community to Auschwitz by the Germans in 1943, when the city’s population once again became mainly Greek. The Runciman Award for 2006 will be massively increased in geographical scope and financial value. Any book published in English anywhere in the world will be eligible for the award, provided it meets the criteria of being wholly or mainly about some aspect of Greece or the world of Hellenism. The value of the prize, sponsored by the National Bank of Greece, will be increased by 80 percent to 9,000 pounds. Five other books were short-listed for the award: «Ancient Greek Athletics,» by Stephen G. Miller, published by Yale University Press; «The Sea! the Sea! – The Shout of the Ten Thousand in the Modern Imagination,» by Tim Rood, published by Duckworth Publishers; «The Burial at Thebes, a translation of Sophocles’ Antigone,» by Seamus Heaney, published by Faber & Faber; «Money and the Early Greek Mind – Homer, Philosophy, Tragedy,» by Richard Seaford, published by Cambridge University Press; and «Greek Warfare – Myths and Realities,» by Hans van Wees, published by Duckworth Publishers This year’s panel of judges was: – Dr Robin Barber, honorary fellow of the Faculty of Arts, Edinburgh University, and author of «The Cyclades in the Bronze Age» and the Blue Guides to Greece and to Athens; – Sir Roger Tomkys KCMG DL, former ambassador, chairman of the Anglo-Hellenic League 1993-1999 and Master of Pembroke College, Cambridge 1992-2004; – Professor Elizabeth Jeffreys, Bywater & Southeby professor of Medieval and Modern Greek Language and Literature, Oxford; – and Dr Dionysis Kapsalis, director of the Cultural Foundation of the National Bank of Greece. For information about the Runciman Award, contact: The Anglo-Hellenic League, 16-18 Paddington Street London W1U 5AS (tel 020.7486.9410) e-mail: [email protected] website: www.hellenicbookservice.com/ahr.htm
