Odysséas Elytis

Odysséas Elytis was born in 1911 in Heraklion, Crete. His first poems appear in review in 1935. In 1940, Elytis went to the front as an officer. Wounded, he narrowly escapes death. In 1948, he leaves Greece devastated by the civil war and settles in Paris where he binds with Picasso, Léger, Matisse, Giacometti and Chagall, and became a friend of René Char and Camus. Back in Greece in 1951, and becoming a leading figure in the intellectual life of the country, he publishes his most completed poems, in particular the famous "Axion Esti" ("He is worthy [of you celebrate] ", beginning of a liturgical hymn), published in 1960. This period established his fame international, crowned with the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1979.

Odysséas Elytis

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