Giorgos Stayrakakis

The poet and songwriter Giorgos Stavrakakis was born in Ierapetra, Crete, in December 1959 and grew up in Heraklion. Since 1996, he has lived and worked in Athens. He began his musical journey by playing and singing Greek and foreign ballads, influenced by the musical landscape of the 1970s, as well as by all those songwriters and composers worldwide who wrote and sang social and political songs. At the beginning of his career, he had the fortune to meet and collaborate for a short period with the great composer Manos Loizos, as well as with the lyricist Manolis Rasoulis. Alongside his music, he writes poetry and frequently contributes to the local press, engaging in the cultural events of Heraklion, while also collaborating with ERA as a radio producer. In the early 1990s, he began writing his first songs. He has released the albums "Resalto" (1997), "Glass Wings" (2002), "Absences" (2006), "Carousel" (2008), "Paper Cities" (2010), "Unplugged" (2013), and his songs have been translated into Italian and released abroad. He has also published poetry collections such as "The Room" (1981), "End of Currency Exchange" (1985), "An Old Summer" (1988), "80+1 Poems" (2004), "Wineries" (2006), and the poetry collection (Corpus) "Beyond the Songs" (2009). His poems have been included in anthologies of contemporary Greek poetry, as well as in the publication of the Poetry Symposium of the University of Patras for the Cretan poets of the century.