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Biography

Philip Owen Arnould Sherrard was born on September 23rd, 1922 in Oxford, into a family with many literary connections. His mother, Brynhild Olivier, had been a member of Rupert Brooke's circle before the First World War, and his half-sister was married to Quentin Bell, the nephew of Virginia Woolf. He was educated at Dauntsey's School and at Peterhouse, Cambridge, where he obtained a degree in History.

  Sherrard first came to Greece as a soldier after the  liberation of Athens in 1946 , and married his first wife, Anna Mirodia, soon thereafter.  He served as Assistant Director of the British School of Archaeology at Athens in 1951-52 and again from 1957-62. His doctoral thesis on the Greek poets Solomos, Palamas, Cavafy, Sikelianos, and Seferis was written under the auspices of London University (King's College).  This thesis eventually became The Marble Threshing Floor  (published 1956). The book was an “introduction to modern Greek poetry for English-speaking readers, and, together with his translations, brought the poetry of Cavafy and Seferis, together with its cultural background, to the attention of the literary world.” Sherrard was baptized into the Orthodox Church in 1956.


  He purchased an estate near Limni on the island of Evia which he used as a retreat.  In 1970 he accepted a lectureship in the History of the Orthodox Church, a post attached jointly to King's College and the School of Slavonic and East European Studies (SSEES). After his resignation in 1977, he moved back to Greece, which was to become his permanent home.  Soon therafter he met and married his second wife, the publisher Denise Harvey. 


  In 1980, together with Kathleen Raine, Keith Critchlow, and Brian Keeble, he was one of the founding members of the journal Temenos, a review devoted to the arts of the imagination. Subsequently this developed into the teaching organization, the Temenos Academy 

 

He died in London on May 30th, 1995 at the age of 72. He was buried near the Orthodox chapel he had had built on his property.