Elytis, Odysseus (1911–1996)

Greek poet. His verse celebrates the importance of the people's attempts to shape an individual existence in freedom.

His major work To Axion Esti/Worthy It Is (1959) is a lyric cycle, parts of which have been set to music by Theodorakis. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1979.

He was born in Crete, and wrote his first poems in 1929. His first collection, Orientations, was published in 1940, and was followed by Sun the First (1943). His ‘Heroic and Elegiac Song of the Lost Second Lieutenant of Albania’ described his experiences on the Albanian front in World War II. Further collections, The Light-Tree and The Monogram, were published in 1971. Among his best later work is The Oxopetra Elegies (1991).