Kyriakos Charalambides

Kyriakos Charalambides was born in Cyprus in 1940 and grew up in Famagusta. He studied History and Archaeology at the University of Athens, attended drama classes at the National Theatre Drama School in Athens and radio broadcasting courses at Bavarian Radio in Munich. He served in secondary education and for thirty years (1968–1998) at the Cyprus Broadcasting Corporation, from which he retired as Director of Radio.

Thirteen of his poetry collections are included in the anthology Poems 1961–2017 (Ikaros, Athens 2019). At the same time, the collection Snail and Moon (Kaleidoscope, Athens 2018), which won the Children’s Literature Book Award from Anagnostis magazine and the Cyprus State Literary Award for Young Children, whilst also being included in the Honour List of the IBBY (International Board on Books for Young People). His new poetry collection, The Night of the Gardens, is published by Ikaros (2022). He has also published three volumes of essays (Slippery Web A and B and Leaning on a Spear) and a selection of texts on Nicosia (in the series A City in Literature).

He was honoured with the Greek Literary Translators’ Society Award (for the book Romanos the Melodist: Three Hymns), the Cyprus State Poetry Prize (for the books The Vessel with the Shapes, Achaean Coast, Famagusta Reigns) and the Greek State Poetry Prize (for Metistoria). The Academy of Athens awarded him the Meropi Oikonomou Prize for the poetry collection Tholos and the Kostas and Eleni Ourani Prize for his entire poetic oeuvre. He also received the International Cavafy Prize in Egypt, the Excellence in Letters, Arts and Sciences of the Republic of Cyprus, the Teukros Anthias-Thodosis Pierides Award for Cultural Contribution, and the Giorgos Filippos Pierides Award from the Cyprus Writers’ Union. He is an honorary doctorate holder of the Department of Philology at the University of Athens, as well as of the School of Theology at the University of Thessaloniki and the Department of Education at the University of the Aegean. He is also a corresponding member of the Academy of Athens and a member of the Cyprus Academy of Sciences, Letters and Arts.

Translations of his poems have been published in eighteen separate volumes in English, French, German, Swedish, Serbian, Bulgarian, Romanian and Albanian.