This life study shows Constantine Cavafy as a flawed genius who sacrificed love to change the course of world poetry. Seeking to capture the complexities of Cavafy’s life and art, Peter Jeffreys and Gregory Jusdanis approach the biography thematically.

The book begins in an Alexandria hospital in 1933 where the poet lies dying, surrounded by friends. In rich detail, it chronicles his family, the vicissitudes of their fortunes, and their eventual poverty as they leave Egypt and move to Liverpool, London, and Istanbul. As the poet reaches adulthood, the biography centers on his beloved Alexandria, the city that nourished his imagination and became for him a metaphor of both his poetry and modern life. The authors then examine the poet’s relationships with his teenage companions, his friends of middle age, and those individuals in later life whom he enlisted in his steadfast pursuit of fame.

Constantine Cavafy: A New Biography also looks closely at Cavafy’s poetry and 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 new poetics, which the world now recognizes as Cavafian. The study ends with the poet’s memorial service, when his literary heir tries to untangle Cavafy’s contradictions and safeguard the legacy of the man who risked everything for a global reputation.

About the Speakers

Peter Jeffreys is an Associate Professor of English at Suffolk University in Boston and has written, translated and edited a number of books on Cavafy: Eastern Questions: Hellenism and Orientalism in the Writings of E. M. Forster; C. P. Cavafy; The Forster-Cavafy Letters: Friends at a Slight Angle; C. P. Cavafy: Selected Prose Works; Reframing Decadence: C. P. Cavafy’s Imaginary Portraits; and Approaches to Teaching the Works of C.P. Cavafy. He is a member of the International Cavafy Archive Academic Committee at the Onassis Foundation and served as a consultant for the exhibits at the Cavafy House in Alexandria and the Cavafy Archive Space in Athens.

Maria Koundoura is the Associate Provost for academic programs at Emerson College. She also holds the rank of full professor of literature in the Department of Writing, Literature and Publishing, where she served as department chair for two terms. She is the author of The Greek Idea: The Formation of National and Transnational Identities and of Transnational Culture, Transnational Identity: The Politics and Ethics of Global Culture Exchange. Her next book project, for which she has received a Folger Shakespeare Library Summer Research Fellowship, is Desire Lines: Metaphors of the Global City. One of the founding editors of the Stanford Humanities Review, Koundoura was also editor of the Journal of Modern Greek Studies published by Johns Hopkins University Press.