'There is something bad here, growing. Day and night I watch it. Growing.'

Elektra, haunted by her father's assassination, is tormented by grief; a fierce instinct for survival; and a thirst for vengeance. When her long-lost brother Orestes at last returns, she urges him to take savage and terrifying action, but at what cost?

This edition of Sophokles' electrifying and timeless play features the magisterial translation by award-winning poet, essayist and translator Anne Carson.

It was published alongside Daniel Fish's production starring Brie Larson, Stockard Channing, Greg Hicks and Patrick Vaill, which opened at the Theatre Royal Brighton in 2025, before transferring at the Duke of York's Theatre in London's West End.

'Carson's translation is a jewel: caustic, forceful, filling the air with memorable images without losing the pulse of action'

'Penetrating... lean, charged and fresh... translated by Canadian poet Anne Carson, with crystalline verse... this is a play about women, power and patriarchy... an oblique lesson for our times'

'Stripped back... full of strangeness and insight... Anne Carson's poetic, prickly translation'

'Anne Carson's vivid translation [is] rigorous but very actable, violently poetic but not above the occasional joke or injection of contemporary irony... riveting'

Sophokles (or Sophocles) (c.496–405 BC) was an ancient Greek tragedian. Of his more than 120 plays, only seven have survived in a complete form: Ajax, Antigone, Women of Trachis, Oedipus Rex, Electra, Philoctetes and Oedipus at Colonus. Anne Carson is a Canadian poet, essayist, translator, classicist, and professor. She has taught classics, comparative literature, and creative writing at universities across the United States and Canada, including McGill, Michigan, NYU, and Princeton. With more than twenty books of writings and translations published to date, Carson was awarded Guggenheim and MacArthur Fellowships, has won the Lannan Literary Award, two Griffin Poetry Prizes, the T. S. Eliot Prize, the Princess of Asturias Award, the Governor General's Award for English-language poetry, and the PEN/Nabokov Award, and was appointed a Member of the Order of Canada in 2005 for her contribution to Canadian letters. Author photo by Peter Smith