Odysseus Elytis was born in Heraklion (Crete) in 1911. The son of an industrialist from Mytilene, the island where Sappho lived, he studied law in Athens, where the family settled in 1914.

In 1935, Elytis met Embirikos, a poet, and through him discovered surrealism, which he supported without exactly "affiliating" himself to it. He published his first poems in magazines, and in 1939 his first major collection, Orientations. Drafted in 1940, he served on the Albanian front. This painful experience would underlie several collections, including Axion Esti (1951).

Between 1948 and 1970, he spent two long periods in France, his "second homeland." In 1976, he published his translations of French poets (notably) and in 1978 Marie des Brumes. The following year, in 1979, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Universally honored, he died in Athens in 1996.