Nanos Valaoritis

Nanos Valaoritis was born in 1921 in Lausanne, Switzerland. He is a poet and writer, the great-grandson of the poet Aristotelis Valaoritis. He studied law, English and French literature at the universities of Athens, London and the Sorbonne. He made his literary debut in 1939 in Nea Grammata. In 1944, he fled German-occupied Greece across the Aegean to Turkey, from there to the Middle East and finally to Egypt. At the urging of George Seferis, he travelled to London to help foster literary ties between Greece and Britain. He met T.S. Eliot, G.H. Odden and Dylan Thomas, and worked for Lewis MacNeice at the BBC. As well as studying English literature at the University of London, he also translates (into English) the works of Greek modernist poets, including Elytis and Empeirikos. In 1947, he published *The Punishment of the Magicians*, his first collection of poetry, in London. From 1954 to 1960, he was part of the Paris Surrealist group. In 1960, he returned to Greece, and between 1963 and 1967 he was the publisher and editor of the literary magazine ‘Pali’. In 1968, he went into self-imposed exile in the USA, where he taught comparative literature and creative writing at the University of San Francisco, a post he held for 25 years. In 1976, he declined an offer to become a corresponding member of the Academy of Athens. In 1983, he was awarded the First State Prize for Poetry for his collection *Some Women* (having previously declined a similar award in 1958). In December 2009, he was awarded the Grand Prize for Literature for his entire body of work. His plays have been performed in Paris, Spoleto, Aarhus and Athens. He has contributed to the literary journals Tetradio, Sima, Horizon, New Writing and Daylight. Since 2004, he has been editor of the literary journal ‘Nea Syntelia’.