Alexandrian Sphinx

The Hidden Life of Constantine Cavafy

Gregory Jusdanis author Peter Jeffreys author

Format:Hardback

Publisher:Simon & Schuster Ltd

Publishing:28th Aug '25

£30.00

This title is due to be published on 28th August, and will be despatched as soon as possible.

Alexandrian Sphinx cover

A gripping and revealing new biography of one of the greatest of modern poets, the queer, Greek-Egyptian Constantine Cavafy, whose admirers have ranged from E.M. Forster, T.S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf to Jackie Onassis, Leonard Cohen and Stephen Fry.

In this illuminating book, Peter Jeffreys and Gregory Jusdanis reveal Cavafy as a flawed genius who sacrificed love to change the course of world poetry. Alexandrian Sphinx chronicles the extraordinary story of his family, the vicissitudes of their fortunes, and their eventual poverty when they left Egypt and moved to Liverpool, London and Istanbul. As the poet reached adulthood, his story centred on his beloved Alexandria, the city that nourished his imagination and became for him a metaphor of both his poetry and modern life.

Alexandrian Sphinx tells not only of Cavafy’s life but of his work and his 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 radical new poetics.

ISBN: 9781398551237

Dimensions: unknown

Weight: unknown

560 pages