Conference on Greek Culture, April 16-17

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Originally From: dimitris_keridis@Harvard.Edu

The George Seferis Chair, Harvard University, The Socrates Kokkalis Program on Southeastern and East-Central Europe, Harvard University, and literary magazines Harvard Review and MondoGreco

present

The Spirit of Greece INSPIRES

April 16 and 17, 1999 Emerson Hall, Harvard University Cambridge, Massachusetts

Friday, April 16 6:00 pm The Greece of Fiction Olga Broumas Jeffrey Eugenides Dario Fo with Franca Rame Edmund Keeley Patricia Storace Barry Unsworth

Saturday, April 17 10:00 am The Greece of Reality Kerin Hope Marcia Christoff Kurop Patrick Quinn Helena Smith

2:30 pm Round Table Greece Replayed first impressions and personal experiences from authors and journalists Moderator: Christopher Hitchens

Participants

Olga Broumas, born and raised in Greece, came to the United States in 1967 through a Fulbright scholarship. In 1972, she won the Yale Younger Poets award. She later received Guggenheim, NEA, Witter Bynner and State Arts fellowships, and published seven collections of poetry and three translations of the work of Greek Nobel laureate Odysseus Elytis. She is a passionate performer, a pioneering educator and a gifted practitioner of the healing arts. Currently a poet-in-residence at Brandeis University and the director of the Undergraduate Honors Writing Program, Broumas resides in Cape Cod.

Jeffrey Eugenides is the author of Virgin Suicides which has been translated into 13 languages, including Greek. His fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Yale Review, and Granta. He is the recipient of many awards, including fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, NEA, a Whiting Writers' Award and the Henry D. Vursell Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Eugenides teaches at Princeton University and lives in New York City with his wife and daughter.

Dario Fo's name is synonymous with anarchic political comedy. His best known plays in English include "Accidental Death of An Anarchist," "Can't Pay, Won't Pay," "Trumpets and Raspberries," and "The Pope and the Witch." Fo, often in collaboration with his wife Franca Rame, has held the field in political satire in Europe. Outside Italy, his comedies are often adapted to reflect local political conditions. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1997.

Christopher Hitchens is a regular contributor to Harper's, Vanity Fair, The Nation, The Times Literary Supplement, and The London Review of Books. His books include Hostage to History: Cyprus from the Ottomans to Kissinger, Prepared for the Worst, Imperial Spoils: The Curious Case of the Parthenon Marbles, and The Monarchy: A Critique of Britain's Favorite Fetish. His book, No One Left to Lie To: The Triangulation of William Jefferson Clinton, was recently published by Verso. A 1970 graduate of Oxford, Hitchens resides in Washington, DC with his wife and daughter.

Kerin Hope, born in the UK, grew up in Australia and Ireland. She studied the classics, drama and archaeology at Bristol and Oxford universities, and took part in excavations in Greece. Hope has worked for United Press International in Athens and London, and for the Associated Press (AP) in Athens and Nicosia. While an AP reporter, she also worked in Turkey, Lebanon, Syria and Libya. Currently, she covers Greece, Cyprus and the south Balkans for The Financial Times and The Economist.

Edmund Keeley studied at Princeton and Oxford universities. He is currently a professor of English, emeritus, at Princeton, where he taught for 40 years and served as director of the creative writing program and the Program in Hellenic Studies. He is the author of seven novels, 14 volumes of poetry in translation, and nine volumes of nonfiction. Keeley's awards include the Rome Prize for fiction of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, two Guggenheim fellowships, the Landon Translation Award of the Academy of American Poets and the first European Prize for Translation of the European Union. Inventing Paradise: The Greek Journey, 1937-1947, will be published next month.

Marcia Christoff Kurop, a graduate of Columbia University, has contributed articles to The Wall Street Journal, The International Herald Tribune, The Economist and The Christian Science Monitor. Based in Sofia, she has covered the Balkan countries since 1993. In Athens, Kurop is at work on a book concerning the history of U.S. policy towards Greece, Turkey and Cyprus since the end of the Cold War.

Patrick Quinn, a reporter for the Associated Press, has covered Greece, Turkey and the Balkan region for more than 10 years. Based in Athens, Quinn has covered most wars and conflicts that broke out in the region following the dissolution of Yugoslavia in the early 1990s. He has also traveled extensively in Turkey and Albania, first visiting the latter before the fall of Communism and on through the armed uprising in 1997. Quinn also reported on the region from the Boston area in the mid-1980s.

Helena Smith, a reporter for The Guardian and The Observer, has studied modern Greek and philosophy at King's College, London University. A regular correspondent for BBC, CBS Radio (New York), RFI (Paris) and RTE (Dublin), Smith also worked for the Associated Press, Daily Express, New Statesman and Society, the European, Conde Nast Traveler, and Wall Street Journal Special Reports.

Patricia Storace is the author of Heredity, a book of poems, and Dinner with Persephone, a travel memoir of Greece. She is the recipient of a poetry prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. A frequent contributor to The New York Times Book Review and Conde Nast Traveler, Storace lives in New York City.

Barry Unsworth is the author of 12 novels, including Sacred Hunger, winner of the 1992 Booker Prize. Two of his novels, Pascali's Island and Morality Play, were shortlisted for this prize and the former served as a basis for a feature film with the same title. Losing Nelson, his latest novel, is due out later this year. He has held literary residencies at the universities of Durham, Newcastle and Liverpool in Britain and Lund in Sweden. He has an honorary doctorate from the University of Manchester, where he graduated and is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

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