Authors and Translators

Demetrios Capetanakis was born in Smyrna, in Asia Minor, where his father worked as a doctor. His father died in 1922, and shortly afterwards there followed the Asia Minor catastrophe and the invasion of Smyrna by the Turkish army; after thirteen days under siege his mother with her three children managed to flee to Athens. In Greece he was ed... more

Bruce Clark is a writer on history, culture and ideas, especially that of the Greeks, for The Economist. His posts as a journalist have included those of diplomatic correspondent for the Financial Times, Moscow correspondent for The Times, and editor of the Economist’s international news pages. Earlier he worked for... more

Juliet du Boulay has an MA in English Literature and Language and a D. Phil. in Social Anthropology. After her first degree she worked on a newspaper in London for two years, and then in 1961 she went to Greece and remained there, with some breaks, until 1973. During 1961–64 she travelled extensively in the villages in mainland Greece an... more

Nikos Gatsos was a Greek poet, critic, and translator. He was born in the village of Asea, in Arcadia in the Peloponnese, and went to school in Tripoli and Athens. By the time he entered the University of Athens to study philosophy he was already a fluent speaker of English and French. In Athens he came into contact with literary figures, part... more

Archimandrite Gregorios Hatziemmanouil was born on the Greek island of Mytilene and read theology at the University of Athens, with postgraduate studies in patristic theology at the University of Strasbourg. He was tonsured a monk at the Monastery of St John the Theologian in Mytilene in 1966 and shortly afterwards was ordained into the priest... more

Please see the entry for Gail Holst-Warhaft for the author's biographical details. more

Gail Holst-Warhaft was born in Australia but lived in Greece before settling in Ithaca, NY. While researching her books on Greek music she played in the orchestras of Mikis Theodorakis and Dionysis Savvopoulos. A poet, translator, musician and professor of Comparative Literature at Cornell University, Holst-Warhaft’s books include The Fall ... more

Maria Iordanidou was born in Constantinople in 1897. Her father, Nikolas Kriezi, was from the Greek island of Hydra and worked as an engineer in the merchant navy; her mother, Evfrosini Magou, was a native of Constantinople. From 1901 until 1909 the family lived in Piraeus, the port city of Athens, but after the separation of her parents Maria... more

Lambros Kamperidis was born in Constantinople, raised in Athens and educated in Canada where he studied philosophy and history. After several jobs in both business and educational fields, he was ordained as deacon in the Orthodox Church of America and after ten years into the priesthood, and he now serves the Greek Orthodox Metropolis of Canad... more

Edmund Keeley, who lives in Princeton, N. J., is the author of seven novels, fifteen volumes of poetry and fiction in translation, and ten volumes of non-fiction. His work in fiction, history, and criticism often makes use of the culture and landscape of Greece, where he lived for three years immediately before the Second World War an... more

There was an old man of Corfu,Who never knew what he should do . . . Edward Lear was born in 1812 in a small village on the outskirts of London, the 20th out of 21 children, though many of them died in infancy. His father had made good as a stockbroker in the city, but when Lear was four years old h... more

Tasos Leivaditis is not a poet often discussed in the English-speaking world, but he is one of the greats amongst the postwar generation of Greek writers. Much of his work is not exactly poetry, but short sayings in poetic form that often run to no more than two or three lines. His literary output is usually divided into three periods... more

Zissimos Lorenzatos is considered by many to have been one of the most important and significant men of letters in Greece in the twentieth century. His family who came from the Ionian island of Cephalonia, an island he was later to visit often, emigrated to Odessa in the late nineteenth century, and afterwards moved to Athens where he was born... more

Peter Mackridge is emeritus Professor of modern Greek at the University of Oxford. He has published several books on modern Greek language and literature, including two co-authored grammars. His translations of stories by the 19th-century author Georgios Vizyenos and a collection of haikus by the 21st-century poet Haris Vlavianos were also ... more

Barbro Noel-Baker was born in Norkoeping, Sweden, and studied English literature and Chinese at the University of Stockholm. In 1949 she joined the Swedish Foreign Office and served in Stockholm and at the Swedish embassies in Buenos Aires and Peking. She married Francis Noel-Baker, a British Labour Member of Parliament and son of the Labour M... more

Alexandros Papadiamandis was born on 4 March 1851 on the small island of Skiathos just off the north-east coast of Evia (Euboea). His father, the priest Adamandios Emmanuel — familiarly addressed as Papa-Diamandis — came from a nautical family which in earlier years had counted monastics and abbots amongst its members. His p... more

Athanasios N. Papathanasiou is an Orthodox lay theologian and lives in Athens, Greece, with his wife Eleni Tamaresi and their son Alexandros-Arethas. He holds a doctorate in missiology (1991) and degrees in theology (1986) and law (1982). He teaches at the post-graduate programme of the Hellenic Open University as well as at a seconda... more

Marcus Plested is Professor of Greek Patristic and Byzantine Theology at Marquette University (Milwaukee, USA). Born (1970) and raised in London, he read modern history followed by theology at Merton College, Oxford. He was received into the Orthodox Church in 1992. He completed his doctorate at Oxford in 1999 with a thesis on the fourth-centu... more

Elder Porphyrios was born in the village of Aghios Ioannis in the province of Karystia on the Greek island of Evia (Euboea). The name he received at birth was Evangelos. His parents, Leonidas and Eleni Bairaktaris, were poor farmers and had difficulty in supporting their large family. For this reason his father left for America where he worked... more

George Seferis was born in Smyrna in Asia Minor, the son of a lawyer-poet. When the First World War broke out the family moved to Athens, where he completed his secondary education, and subsequently to Paris, where he studied law and, in 1924, took his degree. After a long visit to London the following year, he returned to Athens and was appoi... more

Therese Sellers was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1960. She studied Ancient Greek at Germantown Friends School and Harvard College. While at Harvard, she also took classes in Demotic Greek, and studied Modern Greek poetry with George Savidis. She came to Greece in 1987 to follow the traces of the American philhellene Eva Palmer Sikelia... more

Liadain Sherrard was born in Athens of Greek–English parentage. She received her early education in Greece, and later attended boarding school in England. She went on to study for an MA degree at King's College, Cambridge, where she read Modern Languages followed by English. Subsequently she was awarded an MPhil in Renaissance Studies by... more

Philip Sherrard was born in Oxford, grew up in what has come to be called the Bloomsbury world, a world whose outlook could be best described as that of liberal scientific humanism, and studied history at the University of Cambridge. He first came to Greece as a soldier after the liberation of Athens in 1946, an encounter that changed the orie... more

Born in London, Graham Speake was educated at St Paul’s School, where he was a Foundation Scholar, Trinity College, Cambridge, where he won an open exhibition in classics as well as several prizes for the composition of Greek verse, and Christ Church, Oxford, where he was awarded a doctorate for a thesis on the Byzantine transmission of ancien... more

N. N. (Nektarios Nikolaos) Trakakis was born in Melbourne, Australia to parents from Crete. After undertaking undergraduate studies in philosophy and theology, he pursued further research in philosophy of religion at Monash University, completing a PhD on the ‘problem of evil’. He has taught philosophy and religious studies at Monash University and Dea... more

Mary Jaqueline Tyrwhitt (Jacky as she preferred to be known to her friends) was born in Pretoria, South Africa, on 25 May 1905, as her British father, an architect, was working there at the time. Two years later her mother brought Jacky and her infant sister back to England. The sisters spent their childhood in London but during that time they... more

Ilias Venezis, the pen name of Ilias Mellos, was born into an affluent Greek family in the coastal town of Aivali in Asia Minor in 1904. He attended elementary school in Aivali and spent the summers with his several siblings at his maternal grandparents’ farming estate in the Kimindenia mountains. In 1914, at the outbreak of World War II, the ... more

Rex Warner was an English poet, novelist, translator, and scholar of classical literature. He was born in Birmingham and brought up mainly in Gloucestershire, where his father was a clergyman. As a student at Wadham College, Oxford, he associated with W. H. Auden and Cecil Day Lewis, and published in Oxford Poetry. After grad... more

Christopher Montague (Monty) Woodhouse was one of the small band of Second World War scholar-soldiers who became legends as young men. Educated at Oxford, where he read Classics and gained a double first along with other prizes, he then went to the British School at Athens intending to return to an academic career at Oxford. On the outbreak of... more

Vassa Solomou Xanthaki was born in 1931 in Ambelakia, a large imposing village of stone built mansions and cobbled streets, situated high in the foothills of Mount Ossa in Thessaly. She was brought up in Athens, where she studied history and archaeology, and went on to work as a teacher in secondary education and in social welfare programmes. ... more