This episode first aired July 18, 2024.
Think of a place where you can stand at the intersection of Christian and Arab cultures, at the crossroads of the British, Ottoman, Byzantine, Roman and Egyptian empires; a place marked by the struggle between fascism and communism and where the capital city is divided in half as a result of bloody conflict; where the ancient olive trees of Homer's time exist alongside the undersea cables which link up the world's internet.
In "Cypria," named after a lost Cypriot epic which was the prequel to "The Odyssey," British Cypriot writer Alex Christofi writes a deeply personal, lyrical history of the island of Cyprus, from the era of goddesses and mythical beasts to the present day.
Alex Christophi is the author of four books published in 12 languages, including the novels Let Us Be True and Glass, winner of the Betty Trask Prize for fiction. He has written for numerous publications including the Guardian, London Magazine, White Review and the Brixton Review of Books, and contributed an essay to the anthology What Doesn't Kill You: Fifteen Stories of Survival. Dostoevsky in Love, his first work of nonfiction, was shortlisted for the Biographers' Club Slightly Foxed Best First Biography Prize and named as a Literary Non-fiction Book of the Year by the Times and Sunday Times.
