Image: Jehyun Sung

Fragments, Clues, and Surprises in Literary Biographies: Writing Cavafy’s Life

Following the release of a new biography of the Greek diasporic queer poet Constantine Cavafy, author Gregory Jusdanis will read from the book alongside selections of Cavafy’s poetry. He will then engage in conversation with Dutch literary biographer Koen Hilberdink on the thrills and challenges of literary biography as a genre.

Literary biographies have long fascinated the public, as they have offered glimpses into the hidden or lesser-known aspects of writers’ lives. But how do you write an author’s life, especially when it is marked by silences, gaps, and fragmentary records? What are the challenges, thrills, and choices involved in the process of biography-writing?

The springboard for this event is the recent publication of Alexandrian Sphinx: The Hidden Life of C. P. Cavafy (Simon & Schuster, 2025) co-authored by Gregory Jusdanis and Peter Jeffreys. The book sheds new light on the most celebrated modern Greek poet, Constantine Cavafy, whose work has secured a central place in world literature. Cavafy (1863–1933), a homosexual diasporic Greek poet based in Alexandria, Egypt, has inspired generations of readers, yet until now his only biography was Robert Liddel’s volume from 1974. The publication of this new biography is a major literary event that has already attracted wide and enthusiastic reviews in the press, from The Wall Street Journal to The Guardian.

At this event, author Gregory Jusdanis will read excerpts from the biography together with a selection of Cavafy’s poems. He will then join literary biographer Koen Hilberdink and Maria Boletsi in a conversation on the art of life-writing, reflecting on the challenges and unexpected discoveries that arise when narrating an author’s life marked by silences, discontinuities, ambiguities, and fragmentary archives.

About the speakers

Gregory Jusdanis Born in Greece, Gregory Jusdanis emigrated to Hamilton, Ontario where he grew up and attended McMaster University. After studies in Germany and the UK, he came to Indiana for postdoctoral work. He has been teaching Modern Greek and Comparative Literature at the Ohio State University since 1987 and is author of six books. He lives in Columbus Ohio with his wife and has three adult children.

Koen Hilberdink is a biographer. He received his PhD in Maastricht in 2000 for his dissertation I Am a Stranger. I Stand Apart a biography of poet and essayist Paul Rodenko. He subsequently published biographies of the queer poet Hans Lodeizen and the Dutch publisher Johan Polak. In 2023, he published Struggle for the Soul: The Life of P.C. Kuiper (1919–2002) in Psychiatry. In it, he also describes how homosexuality was interpreted from the perspective of psychoanalysis in the Netherlands and America after the Second World War. He is currently working on a biography of the renowned Dutch poet and psychiatrist Rutger Kopland, the pseudonym of Rudi van den Hoofdakker.

Maria Boletsi (moderator) is Endowed Professor of Modern Greek Studies at the University of Amsterdam, where she holds the Marilena Laskaridis Chair, and Associate Professor in Literary Studies at Leiden University. She is author of Barbarism and Its Discontents (Stanford University Press 2013) and Specters of Cavafy (Michigan University Press 2024), and co-author of Barbarian: Explorations of a Western Concept in Theory, Literature and the Arts (Metzler, in 2 vols; 2018/2023).