Friday 13th June, 2025, at The Great Hall, KCL, Strand Campus, London, WC2R 2LS.

We warmly invite you to an evening dedicated to good books and Anglo-Hellenic friendship relations, including an incisive lecture by Professor Elias Papaioannou of the London Business School, on ‘Uprootedness, Human Capital and Anatolia Imprints’, followed by a reception. 

The event will be co-hosted and addressed by Professor Kevin Featherstone, chair of the Council of the Anglo-Hellenic League, and Professor Gonda Van Steen, director of the Centre for Hellenic Studies. Please register here to attend in person and here to attend via Zoom.

Since 1986, the Award has rewarded annually the best book or books published the previous year in English about some aspect of Greece. The Award this year goes to the winner of the best book published in 2024.

Our chair of judges, Sofka Zinovieff, will announce the winner, who will attend the event and speak about the winning book.

Abstract: The abrupt exodus of nearly a million Christian Orthodox from Anatolia over a century ago reshaped Greece’s social and demographic fabric. Today, four in ten Greeks trace their lineage to these refugees—yet the long-term effects of their displacement on Greece’s human capital remain largely underexplored. How did forced migration influence educational trajectories across generations? Did refugees adapt by investing in portable skills, or did they struggle to catch up with the autochthonous population?

Using large data on refugee origins, settlements, and education over three generations, strong evidence emerges for an ‘uprootedness hypothesis’: while initially lagging behind, refugees in rural areas surpassed locals in educational attainment, favouring degrees with global mobility—engineering and medicine—while locals leaned toward law and other home-biased fields. Beyond history, the case offers timely lessons for today’s migration crises and demographic deficits.  Displacement, if properly supported, can drive long-term resilience and economic growth.

About the speaker: Elias Papaioannou is a professor of economics at the London Business School, where he co-directs the Wheeler Institute for Business and Development. Papaioannou, a fellow of the British Academy, also serves as a managing co-editor of the Review of Economic Studies, one of the top scholarly general-interest journals in economics. He has worked at the European Central Bank and Dartmouth College and held visiting professorships at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Harvard. His research covers international finance, political economy, economic history, and growth.

The Runciman Award and Ceremony are generously sponsored by the A.G. Leventis Foundation and the Athanasios C. Laskaridis Charitable Foundation.