Kostas Stergiopoulos

Poet, prose writer, critic, and emeritus professor of Modern Greek Philology, Kostas Stergiopoulos was born in Athens in 1926. He studied philology at the University of Athens and completed his doctoral dissertation at the University of Thessaloniki. He taught for a decade in private secondary education and at the L. Stavrakos School of Cinema and Theatre. From 1966 to 1969, he worked as a lecturer in the Department of Modern Greek Philology at the University of Athens and then as an assistant in the Byzantine and Modern Greek Philology Workshop at the University of Athens (1969-1972), from which he was dismissed by the dictatorship. In 1974, he became a professor in the same department at the University of Ioannina, where he served until 1984, when he took early retirement. In 1986, he was named an emeritus professor. He first appeared in literature—as a high school student—in the magazine "Nea Estia" in 1943, and since then, his writings have been published in numerous magazines and newspapers. He was responsible for the critique column in the magazine "Xekinima" (1946-1947), the newspaper "Niki" (1962-1963), and the magazine "Epoches" (1963-1967). He published ten poetry collections, two books of short stories, one novel, and nine critical and philological books. He was honored twice with the State Poetry Prize (the second prize in 1961 and the first in 1992), the Critique Study Prize from the "Group of 12" (1963), the First State Study and Essay Prize (1974), the Essay and Study Prize from the Academy of Athens' Ouranis Foundation (1997), and the Grand Prize for Literature for his entire body of work (2004). His poems have been translated into French, English, Italian, German, Swedish, Russian, Polish, Romanian, Bulgarian, Spanish, and Hungarian and published in international magazines and anthologies, while his short stories and critical essays have been translated into French, Bulgarian, Polish, English, Spanish, and Italian. In 1994, a selection of his entire poetic work up to that point was published in German under the title "Here Where Light Battles Gravity," in 1999, his entire collection "The Midnight Sun" was released in Spanish, and the following year, a selection from seven of his collections was published in Italian under the title "The Luster of Day." He was a founding member of the Society of Authors and its former president, as well as a founding member and honorary president of the Hellenic Society for General and Comparative Literature. He participated in many Greek and international conferences and served as president or member of various committees on literature and books. He passed away on January 11, 2016, at the age of 90.