Edmund Keeley Books & Biography

Edmund Keeley was born in Damascus, Syria, of American parents and lived in Canada and Greece before his family settled in Washington, D.C. He studied at Princeton and Oxford, and taught Creative Writing and Hellenic Studies at Princeton until his retirement in 1994 as Straut Professor of English Emeritus. He is the author of fifteen volumes of poetry in translation, five volumes of non-fiction, and six novels, most recently School for Pagan Lovers. His fiction won the Rome Prize of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and selection by the PEN/NEA Fiction Syndicate. His translations received the Harold Morton Landon Award of the Academy of American Poets and the European Community's First European Prize for the Translation of Poetry. He has served as President of PEN American Center and twice as President of the Modern Greek Studies Association, of which he was a founding member. With his wife, Mary, he lives part of the year in Princeton and part in Athens, Greece.