Tasos G. Denegris

Tasos Denegris (1934-2009) was born in Athens. He studied film and social sciences at the University of Rome (1954-1957). Shortly before, he had published his first poems in the magazine "Strofi" (1952). He was a member of the editorial team of the magazine "Pali," but his first book, "Death in Kaningos Square," was published in 1974. He is considered one of the quintessential representatives, albeit a very sparse writer, of the poetic "Generation of the '70s." In 1975, he was invited to Iowa, USA, for the International Writing Program. He actively participated in the founding of the Society of Authors in 1982. In 1983, he read his poems at the Poetry Festival in Cambridge, England, and the same year in Belgrade, following an invitation from the Union of Serbian Writers. In 1985, he was invited to New Delhi and Bhopal, India. In 1990, he visited the University of Strasbourg and Murcia, Spain, and again in Murcia in 1996, and in Medellin, Colombia, and Lima, Peru, in 1998. He published the collections "Death in Kaningos Square" (1974), "The Blood of the Wolf" (1978), "Sulfur and Apotheosis" (1982), "Instantaneous" (a collected edition of the first three collections, 1985), "The Spirit of Defense" (1999), and the collected edition "The Wild Boar Speaks: Poems 1952-2008" ("Ypsilon," 2008). He translated poetry and prose by Octavio Paz, Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortázar, John Dos Passos, Robert Louis Stevenson, Michael Longley, Claude Esteban, and others, from Spanish, English, and French. He passed away in Athens at the age of 74, on Saturday, February 7, 2009. (photo: Yianna Boufi, 2000)