Cavafian Alexandria

The novelist, essayist and translator Edmund Keeley was born in Damascus, Syria, to American parents, in 1928. He is a graduate of Princeton and Oxford Universities. As a graduate of Princeton and Oxford Universities, Keeley taught English, Creative Writing and Modern Greek Literature at Princeton for forty years. For several years he served as Director of the Creative Writing Programme and the Greek Studies Programme. He was a founding member of the Society for Modern Greek Studies and served twice as its President. Between 1991 and 1993, he served as President of the American REN Centre, the writers’ association, and, on nine occasions, represented the Centre at international REN conferences: in Lugano, Paris, Vienna, Barcelona, Rio de Janeiro, Santiago de Compostela, Perth, Guadalajara and Edinburgh. He is also a member of the REN Board of Directors.

Edmund Keeley has written seven novels, numerous essays and has translated a wealth of poetic works, including those of Seferis, Ritsos, Cavafy, Elytis and Sikelianos. He founded and directed the Department of Greek Literature at Princeton University for forty years, where he also taught modern Greek literature. A significant part of his essayistic work focuses on the leading Greek poets. He has been honoured on numerous occasions for his writing and translation work. For his first novel, *The Libation*, Edmund Keeley was awarded the Rome Prize by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 1992, he was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. For his translations of poetry, he has been honoured with the Columbia Translation Center/PEN Award (1975), the Harold Morton Landon Award from the Academy of American Poets (1980) and the First European Prize for Poetry Translation awarded by the European Economic Community (1987).