Nasos Vayenas - Biography#

NASOS VAYENAS was born in 1945 in Drama, in northern Greece. He studied literature at the universities of Athens, Rome, Essex and Cambridge – where he wrote The Poet and the Dancer, his Ph.D. thesis on George Seferis (published in Greek in 1979).

His first book of poems appeared in 1974 and since then he has published eleven more collections, a book of imaginative prose, as well as several critical works, among them "The Language of Irony", which was awarded the Greek National Prize for Criticism in 1995.

His poetry has been translated into many languages and he is the recipient of major literary awards, including the Greek National Prize for Poetry (2005) for his collection "Garland", the Attilio Bertolucci Poetry Prize (Italy, 2007), and the Branko Radičević Prize (Serbia, 2007).

From 1980 to 1991 he was Professor of Modern Greek Literature at the University of Crete. Since 1992, he had been Professor of Literary Theory and Criticism at the University of Athens, where he now lives. He is now Emeritus Professor of the University of Athens.