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Andonis Fostieris Author

ANDONIS FOSTIERIS was born in Athens, Greece, in 1953. He studied Law at the University of Athens and History of Law at the Sorbonne. One of the younger poets of the Generation of the Seventies, Fostieris made his first appearance in 1971 at the age of eighteen with his collection The Great Journey. He was, already by 1975, the editor of The New Poetry, one of Greece’s first new post-dictatorship journals. For thirty years (1981–2010) he was the co-editor and director of the esteemed literary journal Η Λέξη (The Word). He has published ten collections, now all gathered together in Complete Poems 1970–2020 which appeared in 2021. After decades of the stifling domination of Modernism in Greece, Greek poetry, with Andonis Fostieris, returns to the ancient sources in order to move forward to the Post-modern — developing from, while surpassing Modernism. His poetics marks a change of direction and constitutes a new understanding of the role and function of contemporary poetry and its relationship to philosophy and tradition, while putting forward a coherent conceptualization of the function of language and its relation to truth. Fostieris has been extensively translated into many languages, often by acclaimed translators. He has received many awards, most notably, in 2004, the Greek State Poetry prize for his 2003 collection Precious Oblivion, and in December 2010 the prestigious Ouranis Foundation Award of the Academy of Athens for his entire poetic oeuvre at that date.