The last twelve months or so (Oct 2023 . . . Nov 2024) : Musings of a disordered mind

ANTHONY HIRST was born in Huddersfield, Yorkshire in 1945. He was educated at Ashville College Harrogate, and Emmanuel College Cambridge, where he studied theology and English. He had a very varied career as library assistant, furniture maker, building contractor, architectural designer and postman, before returning to university in 1992, obtaining an MA in Byzantine Studies and PhD in Modern Greek Literature at King's College London, after which he was a research fellow at Princeton University and then at Queen's University Belfast, where he was later a lecturer in Byzantine and Modern Greek. He is course director of the International Byzantine Greek Summer School, now hosted by Trinity College Dublin. He is the author of GOD AND THE POETIC EGO: THE APPROPRIATION OF BIBLICAL AND LITURGICAL LANGUAGE IN THE POETRY OF PALAMAS, SIKELIANOS AND ELYTIS (Peter Lang, 2004); editor and translator of THESE SCATTERED ISLES: ALONNISOS AND THE LESSER NORTHERN SPORADES by Kostas Mavrikis (Oxford Maritime Research, 2010); and editor of ALEXANDRIA, REAL AND IMAGINED (with Michael Silk, Ashgate Publishing, 2004), THE IONIAN ISLANDS: ASPECTS OF THEIR HISTORY AND CULTURE (with Patrick Sammon, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014). He has re-edited, or "de-edited" as he prefers to say, the Greek text of the main body of Cavafy's poetry for the Oxford World's Classics series (C. P. Cavafy, THE COLLECTED POEMS, Oxford University Press, 2007). He has published many articles on modern Greek literature (especially the poetry of Cavafy). He has three children and six grandchildren and in recent years has lived between Stoke Newington in northeast London and an old farmhouse in Sud Tourraine. His previous volumes of poetry are MEMORIALS, NIGHTSCAPES, ETCETERA: POEMS OF SEVERAL DECADES (Colenso Books, 2020), FLORA AND FAUNA (HOMINIDS INCLUDED) (The Delos Press, 2021), and TWO YEARS AT THE ROAD SIDE (Colenso Books, 2024).