Authors and Translators

Demetrios Capetanakis

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

Juliet du Boulay

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 and Evia... more

Nikos Gatsos

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

Hieromonk Gregorios

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

Gail Holst

Gail Holst-Warhaft was born in Australia but has spent most of her life involved with Greece. She has been, at various times, a journalist, broadcaster, writer, academic, musician, poet, and independent scholar. In the 1970s, while carrying out research for two books about Greek music, she performed as a keyboard-player with Greece’s leading c... more

Lambros Kamperidis

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

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

Edward Lear

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

Zissimos Lorenzatos

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

Barbro Noel-Baker

Barbro Noel-Baker was born in Norkpoping, 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

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 parents had ... more

Elder Porphyrios

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 ... more

George Seferis

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

Philip Sherrard

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

Mary Jaqueline Tyrwhitt

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

Rex Warner

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

C. M. Woodhouse

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