Authors, Books, Ideas. A collaboration of HFBC and Megaron-the Athens Concert Hall for books

The Hellenic Foundation for Books and Culture (HFBC) and the Megaron-the Athens Concert Hall are collaborating for the first time to bring dialogue to the city, as part of Megaron Plus programme. In a paradoxical and transitional era, where dialogue is shrinking while demands for dialogue are increasing, a new series under the general title “Authors, Books, Ideas” gives the floor to people from the worlds of literature, science, and the arts, to promote originality, authenticity, storytelling, research, the art of discussion, and orality.

At the first three events:

Italian author Vincenzo Latronico opens the programme on Friday, January 23, 2026. He will introduce us to millennials, the world of the Internet, and digital nomadism through his latest novel, Perfection, which is already being discussed and translated around the world.

On Tuesday, February 24, 2026, Greek-American professor Gregory Jusdanis will talk to us about the challenge of writing a biography of the most prominent Greek poet, Cavafy, and how Alexandrian Constantine Cavafy became the world-renowned poet C. P. Cavafy. What research methods someone uses, what is being revealed, how someone deals with a poetic myth?

On Monday, April 27, 2026, Georgios Varouxakis, professor of the History of Political Ideas at Queen Mary University of London, will present the idea of the West based on his book The West: The History of an Idea. Are the West and Europe synonymous? Who is considered Western? Is this central idea of political thought and intellectual history in crisis? 

Vincenzo Latronico, writer and translator, has written four novels: Ginnastica e Rivoluzione (2008), La cospirazione delle colombe (2011), La mentalità dell’alveare (2014) and Le perfezioni (2022, translated in Greek by Dimitra Dotsi, Loggia 2025), as well as two non-fiction books. His work Perfection has been translated into forty languages, was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize, longlisted for the Strega 2023, while its English translation was included on the longlist for the American Literary Translation Award 2025. Latronico is the first author to be awarded the Tom Wolfe AirMail 2025 (jointly with Meghan Daum). As a translator, he has devoted himself to retranslating classic works by Alexandre Dumas and Oscar Wilde. His writings have been published in the Guardian, Internazionale, and Corriere della Sera. He lives in Milan.

Gregory Jusdanis is a distinguished professor of arts and sciences at Ohio State University and author of several significant works:The Poetics of Cavafy, Belated Modernity and Aesthetic Culture, The Necessary Nation, Fiction Agonistes, and A Tremendous Thing. Together with Peter Jeffreys, he co-authored Constantine Cavafy: A New Biography, which is also available in Greek as Konstantinos Kavafis. The Man and the Poet (translated by Michalis Makropoulos, Metaixmio 2025). Jusdanis has received fellowships from prestigious institutions: the Guggenheim Foundation, the US National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), the American Council of Learned Societies, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Georgios Varouxakis, of Cretan descent, studied History and Archaeology at the University of Athens. He holds a master’s degree in Legal and Political Theory and a PhD in History from UCL London. Since 2006, he has been teaching at Queen Mary University of London where he focuses on the history of political thought in the 19th and 20th centuries, with a particular emphasis on the historical development of the concepts of “Europe” and “the West.” Varouxakis is the author of numerous books, he co-directs the Centre for the Study of the History of Political Thought at Queen Mary and interdisciplinary programmes, and has collaborated as a research fellow with several universities: UCL, Princeton, Lichtenberg College at the University of Göttingen, University of Göttingen, Institute for Humanistic Studies in Vienna, etc. His book The West: The History of an Idea (2025, Princeton University Press) will be published in Greek by Patakis Publications, translated by Andreas Pappas.

V. Latronico’s event starts at 18.00. The other two events start at 19:00.

Free entrance
Up to two admission tickets per person, distribution of which begins one week before the event at megaron.gr