Nikos Fokas
One of the most important figures in contemporary Greek literature, Nikos Fokas was born on the Greek island of Kefalonia in 1927 and educated in Athens. From 1960 to 1974 he lived in London and worked in the Greek division of the BBC World Service. Along with several volumes of fiction and critical essays, he has published 14 books of poetry—the most recent of which are Collected Poems: 1954–2000 (Ypsilon, 2002) and Free Theme: Prose Poems (Estias, 2005)—and 11 volumes of translations, including, from English, the work of Thomas Hardy, Thomas de Quincy, Robert Frost and Philip Larkin. Booklength collections of his poetry have been translated into French, Serbo-Croat, Bulgarian and Italian, but to date only a handful of his poems have appeared in English. An Honorary Fellow at the University of Iowa, and a former Stanley J. Seeger Writer-in-Residence in the Hellenic Studies Program at Princeton University, Nikos Fokas received in 2007 the two highest honors in Greek letters—the Grand Prize in Literature from the Greek Ministry of Culture and the Medal of Distinction in Letters from the Athens Academy of Arts and Sciences—both of which were awarded for lifetime achievement. He currently lives in Athens with his wife Angela.
Works appearing in the Marlboro Review: