Books Inspired by The Odyssey

With the pending release of the Christopher Nolan’s movie, The Odyssey, based on the epic poem of the same name by Homer, I have begun reading Emily Wilson’s translation, which was published in 2018. I will write a post when I finish.

The Odyssey has inspired the creation of many poems, plays, and books. I mention a few here.

Penelope

Penelope is Odysseus’s faithful wife who waits twenty years for his return. Margaret Atwood and Claire North have both written novels about Penelope.

The Penelopiad

Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad is a highly regarded novella that was published in 2005. Wikipedia provides a long article about this book.

The Songs of Penelope

Claire North wrote a three-book series in 2022–2024, The Songs of Penelope:

• Ithaca (narrated by Hera)
• House of Odysseus (narrated by Aphrodite)
• The Last Song of Penelope (narrated by Athena)

Penelope’s Bones

In 2025 the University of Chicago Press published Penelope’s Bones: A New History of Homer’s World through the Women Written Out of It by Emily Hauser. This is history, not fiction, and of all the books about Penelope, I plan to start with this one.

Circe

Circe is a witch goddess who turns Odysseus’s men into pigs and holds them and Odysseus captive for a year on her island, Aiaia. The novel Circe, by Madeline Miller, gives Circe’a story told as a m emoir. During the year Circe holds Odysseus captive, she gives birth to a son, Telegonus, of whom Odysseus is the father. I have read this book, and it is very good.

The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel

Nikos Kazantzakis, the famous Greek author of Zorba the Greek, spent many years writing a poetic sequel to The Odyssey, finishing Οδύσσεια (Odusseia) in 1938. An English translation titled The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel, translated by Kimon Friar, was published in 1958, and I remember reading this book many decades ago. There is a great review of this book by “Amateur Reader (Tom)” on his blog, Wuthering Expectations.

The Aeneid

The Aeneid by Publius Vergilius Maro, was written during the reign of Augustus, the first emperor of Rome. This epic poem, written in Latin, follows the travels of the mythological character Aeneas from the ruined city of Troy to Italy, where Aeneas becomes one of the ancestors of Augustus.

Ulysses

Of course, there is Ulysses by James Joyce, which is in outline based on The Odyssey and admired as much as Homer’s epic.

O Brother, Where Art Thou?

The wonderful movie O Brother, Where Art Thou? is also loosely based on The Odyssey.

Reading Epic Literature

I have read The Odyssey many times as new translations appeared. During my undergraduate education, I took a course about the epic in literature. I remember that we read The Iliad, The Odyssey, The Aeneid, Paradise Lost by John Milton, The Dunciad by Alexander Pope, and The Prelude by William Wordsworth. That was quite a course, and it was a nice diversion from math and science.

About twenty years ago I took a noncredit evening course at Harvard about James Joyce’s Ulysses. I own the Gabler Edition of the book and two or three reading guides, and I would like to read the novel again some day.