Authors Archives - Page 2 of 3

Hippocrates September 3, 2019 – Posted in: Authors

Hippocrates was born around the year 460 BC on the Greek island of Kos and legendary genealogy traces his paternal heritage directly to Asclepius and his maternal ancestry to Hercules. He was probably trained at the Asclepieion of Kos, and took lessons from the Thracian physician Herodicus of Selymbria. Throughout his life Hippocrates taught and practiced medicine, traveling as far as Thessaly, Thrace, and the Sea of Marmara. He died, most probably in Larissa, at…

Ilias Venezis June 19, 2019 – Posted in: Authors

Ilias Venezis was born in Ayvali, Asia Minor (modern-day Turkey) in 1904. Ιn 1922, when 1.5 million Greeks were displaced from Asia Minor, eighteen-year-old Venezis was taken prisoner and sent to serve as forced labour for fourteen months in central Anatolia. This experience informed much of his writing, including his novel Number 31328. He was a prolific writer of novels, short stories, histories, travelogues and more. His work has been translated in many languages. In…

M. Karagatsis – Posted in: Authors

M. Karagatsis (the pen name of Dimitris Rodopoulos) was born in Athens in 1908 and studied law in Grenoble and Athens. He is considered one of the finest Greek prose writers of the twentieth century and a central figure in the Generation of the ’30s, a group of writers, poets, artists, and scholars that introduced fresh modernist currents to Greek literature and art. He was a prolific writer, with over ten published novels, as well…

Sofia Zarabouka June 5, 2019 – Posted in: Authors

Sofia Zarabouka is an author and illustrator of children books. Born in Athens she studied painting and theatre in Greece, and graphic arts and illustration in the United States. She is particularly known for her adaptations for children of the Greek Mythology, Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, and ancient Greek dramas like Aristophanes’ comedies and Aeschylus’s Orestia. Sofia’s illustrations have been exhibited in many countries and feature in museum collections. She has received various awards both…

Roderick Beaton – Posted in: Authors, Translators

Roderick Beaton grew up in Edinburgh and studied English Literature at Cambridge, before specialising in Modern Greek studies. For thirty years until his retirement he held the Koraes Chair of Modern Greek and Byzantine History, Language and Literature at King’s College London, and is now Emeritus. Roderick is the author of several books of non-fiction, one novel, and several translations of fiction and poetry, all of them connected to Greece and the Greek-speaking world. He…

Pythagoras – Posted in: Authors

Pythagoras, an important philosopher, mathematician and music theorist, was born on the island of Samos, probably in 585 BC. He studied with the philosopher Pherecydes in Syros and with Thales and Anaximander in Miletus, and travelled widely, including to Egypt, where he lived for more than twenty years, and Babylonia. Pythagoras eventually settled in Croton in southern Italy, where he founded his school. His teachings have come down to us thanks to his hundreds of…

Odysseus Elytis – Posted in: Authors

Odysseus Elytis (1911-1996) has been a leading figure in the “Generation of the 1930s”, whose poets, influenced by surrealism, renewed contemporary Greek poetry. During the post-war years he lived for long periods in France, where he associated with the pioneers of the world’s avant-garde (Reverdy, Tzara, Breton, Ungaretti, Matisse, Picasso, Giacometti). He published seventeen collections of poetry, translations from ancient Greek and modern European poets, and two volumes of prose. In 1979 he was awarded…

Nikiforos Vrettakos – Posted in: Authors

Nikiforos Vrettakos was born on January 1, 1912 in the village of Krokees near Sparta. In a literary career lasting some sixty years, he published over eighty-five collections of poetry, eight prose works, a long critical study of Nikos Kazantzakis and wrote innumerable articles and essays for periodicals and newspapers. In Greece, he received more awards than any other poet of his generation, including three State Prizes for Poetry. In 1987, he was elected to…

Tsitas Makis, photo by Yiorgos Fermeletzis

Makis Tsitas – Posted in: Authors

Makis Tsitas was born in Yiannitsa in 1971. He studied Journalism in Thessaloniki and has worked in radio. He now lives in Athens, where he runs the online literary journal diastixo.gr. A prolific writer of children’s books, he has also written a collection of short stories, which was widely translated, as well as plays and song lyrics. God Is My Witness is his first novel. It was awarded the European Union Prize for Literature in…

Katharine Butterworth – Posted in: Authors

Katharine Butterworth (1931-2018) was the founder and director for 25 years of “Study in Greece”, an accredited college study program for juniors and seniors in Athens, based on contemporary Greek life, and as such the first of its kind.