I first encountered Constantine Cavafy in Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet, where ‘the old poet’ represented the ghostly voice of the city.

I was immediately attracted to the dreamlike quality of his poems, and the way he captured a sense of melancholy that I’ve always felt.

Cavafy wrote about human desire, inglorious epochs of Greek history, and civilizations in decline, using plain factual descriptions undressed by metaphor.

But how did a writer who showed little promise in his youth find a place in the literary canon and become ‘the poet of Alexandria’?

I’m joined by Gregory Jusdanis, co-author of Constantine Cavafy: A New Biography.

We spoke about Cavafy’s childhood of faded aristocratic grandeur, the Mediterranean Greek world he grew up in, and his lifelong poetic preoccupations.

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