Giorgos Seferis

Giorgos Seferis, the pen name of Georgios Seferiadis, was born in 1900 in Urla, near Smyrna, on the Aegean coast of Asia Minor, then part of the Ottoman Empire. His family moved to Athens in 1914, and he went on to study law in Paris. While he was there, in 1922, the Greek defeat in Asia Minor ended the centuries-old Greek presence in his birthplace and scattered its population; the loss of the world of his childhood became a permanent undercurrent in his poetry.

Seferis entered the Greek diplomatic service in 1926 and remained a diplomat for most of his life. His first collection, Turning Point (1931), was formally polished and marked by French Symbolism; with Mythistorema (1935), written in unrhymed, plain-spoken free verse, he found his own voice, setting fragments of Homeric myth beside a modern landscape of rocks, wrecked ships and weary voyagers. During the Second World War he followed the Greek government into exile in Crete, Egypt, South Africa and Italy, and the Logbook sequences record those years. The Thrush, written after the war, is a meditation on light, guilt and the shades of the dead. His essays and translations, notably of Eliot, were influential in shaping modern Greek letters.

He served as ambassador to Britain from 1957 to 1962, and in 1963 became the first Greek to receive the Nobel Prize. In 1969, after two years of military dictatorship, he broke his public silence with a statement against the junta broadcast by the BBC. When he died in Athens in 1971, his funeral drew large crowds and became a demonstration against the regime.