Greek Writers

Ancient period

• Aeschylus
• Alcaeus
• Alcman
• Anacreon
• Apollodorus
• Apollonius Rhodius
• Aristophanes
• Callimachus
• Cassius Dio
• Euripides
• Eusebius of Caesarea
• Hecataeus of Miletus
• Hecataeus of Abdera
• Hesiod
• Homer
• Longus
• Marcus Annaeus Lucanus, frequently called Lucan
• Menander
• Pausanias
• Pindar
• Polycarp
• Sappho
• Sophocles
• Theocritus

Medieval period

• Anna Comnena
• Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus
• Isaac of Nineveh
• John of Damascus
• Michael Psellos
• Procopius
• Zozimus

Modern period

Andreas Kalvos (Greek: Ἀνδρέας Κάλβος; 1792 - November 3, 1869) was a contemporary of Dionysios Solomos and one of the greatest Greek writers of the 19th century.

Manolis Anagnostakis (10 March 1925 – 23 June 2005) was a Greek poet and critic at the forefront of the Marxist and existentialist poetry movements arising during and after the Greek Civil War in the late 1940s. Anagnostakis was a leader amongst his contemporaries and influenced the generation of poets immediately after him. His poems have been honored in Greece's national awards and arranged and sung by contemporary musicians. 

Constantine P. Cavafy, also known as Konstantin or Konstantinos Petrou Kavafis, or Kavaphes (Greek Κωνσταντίνος Π. Καβάφης) (April 29, 1863 – April 29, 1933) was a renowned modern Greek poet who lived in Alexandria and worked as a journalist and civil servant. In his poetry he examined critically some aspects of Christianity, patriotism, and homosexuality, though he was not always comfortable with his role as a nonconformist. He published 154 poems; dozens more remained incomplete or in sketch form. His most important poetry was written after his fortieth birthday.

Kiki Dimoula (Greek: Κική Δημουλά) (born Athens 1931) is an acclaimed Greek poet. She worked as a clerk for the Bank of Greece. She was married to the poet Athos Dimoulas (1921-1985), with whom she had two children. Since 2002, Dimoula is a member of the Academy of Athens.

She has been awarded the Greek State Prize twice (1971, 1988), as well as the Kostas and Eleni Ouranis Prize (1994) and the Αριστείο Γραμμάτων of the Academy of Athens (2001). She is to be awarded the European Literature Prize for 2010. Her poetry has been translated into English, French, German, Swedish, Danish, Spanish, and many other languages.

Odysseas Elytis (Greek: Οδυσσέας Ελύτης) (November 2, 1911—March 18, 1996) was a Greek poet regarded as a major exponent of romantic modernism in Greece and the world. In 1979, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1979.

Andreas Embirikos (Greek: Ανδρέας Εμπειρίκος) (Brăila, 1901 – Athens, 1975) was a Greek surrealist poet and the first Greek psychoanalyst.

Iakovos Kambanelis or Kampanellis (born 1922) is a Greek poet, playwright, lyricist, and novelist. Born December 2, 1922 in Hora in the island of Naxos, Kambanelis is currently one of the most popular Greek artists. A survivor of the Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp, he authored a Mauthausen cantata with music by Mikis Theodorakis. He also authored at least 12 films, two of which he directed himself. In addition, he is known as a song author. He is also a member of the board of Morfotiko Idryma Ethnikis Trapezis cultural society, along with some of the most prominent Greek artists.

Kostas Karyotakis (Greek: Κώστας Καρυωτάκης, October 30, 1896 – July 20, 1928) is considered one of the most representative Greek poets of the 1920s and one of the first poets to use iconoclastic themes in Greece. His poetry conveys a great deal of nature, imagery and traces of expressionism and surrealism. The majority of Karyotakis' contemporaries viewed him in a dim light throughout his lifetime without a pragmatic accountability for their contemptuous views; for after his suicide,the majority began to revert to the view that he was indeed a great poet. He had a significant, almost disproportionately progressive influence on later Greek poets.

 Kostis Palamas (Greek: Κωστής Παλαμάς; 13 January 1859 — 27 February 1943) was a Greek poet who wrote the words to the Olympic Hymn. He was a central figure of the Greek literary generation of the 1880s and one of the cofounders of the so-called New Athenian School (or Palamian School, or Second Athenian School) along with Georgios Drosinis, Nikos Kampas, Ioanis Polemis.

Alexandros Papadiamantis (Greek: Ἀλέξανδρος Παπαδιαμάντης) (March 4, 1851 - 3 January 1911) was a famous and influential Greek writer of the 19th century.

Ioannis (or Yannis) Psycharis (Greek Ιωάννης (Γιάννης) Ψυχάρης, French Jean Psychari, 1854-1929) was a philologist, author and promoter of Demotic Greek. Psycharis was the coiner of the term diglossia, which describes a language community's simultaneous use of the genuine mother tongue of the present day, the vernacular, and a dialect from centuries earlier in the history of the language. The vernacular is of low prestige and is discouraged or totally forbidden for written use and formal spoken use, while the obsolete dialect is of high prestige and is used for most written communication and for formal speeches by institutions of authority such as government and religious institutions. Diglossia was a major issue in Greek society and politics in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Psycharis was born to a Greek family in Odessa (territory of modern-day Ukraine), Imperial Russia on the coast of the Black Sea. Nicholas I of Russia still reigned at the time of his birth and his government exercised censorship and other controls over education, publishing, and all manifestations of public life.

Psycharis lived most of his adult life in Paris where he was employed as a professor.

Psycharis also proposed an innovative orthography for Greek which never really caught on, despite being the focus of several serious attempts at implementation continuing into the late 20th century. A beginning Modern Greek textbook for foreign students, Ellinika Tora (Greek Now), employs some of his suggestions such as substituting rho for lambda when the pronunciaton of the glide is conditioned by the other sounds around it - thus αδερφός (aderfos) instead of standard αδελφός (adelphos). While this and other of his suggestions more accurately reflect true pronunciation, they seem to have little chance of being adopted.

Yiannis Ritsos (Greek: Γιάννης Ρίτσος) (Monemvasia May 1, 1909 - Athens November 11, 1990) was a Greek poet and left-wing activist and an active member of the Greek resistance during World War II.

Giorgos or George Seferis (Γιώργος Σεφέρης) was the pen name of Geōrgios Seferiádēs (Γεώργιος Σεφεριάδης, 13 March 1900 - September 20, 1971). He was one of the most important Greek poets of the 20th century, and a Nobel laureate. He was also a career diplomat in the Greek Foreign Service, culminating in his appointment as Ambassador to the UK, a post which he held from 1957 to 1962.

Dionysios Solomos (Greek: Διονύσιος Σολωμός, 8 April 1798 - 9 February 1857) was a Greek poet from Zakynthos. He is best known for writing the Hymn to Liberty (Greek: Ὕμνος εἰς τὴν Ἐλευθερίαν, Ýmnos eis tīn Eleutherían), of which the first two stanzas on music by Nikolaos Mantzaros became the Greek national anthem in 1865. He was the central figure of the Heptanese School of poetry, and is considered the national poet of Greece - not only because he wrote the national anthem, but also because he contributed to the preservation of earlier poetic tradition and highlighted its usefulness to modern literature. Other notable poems include Ο Κρητικός (Τhe Cretan), Ελεύθεροι Πολιορκημένοι (The Free Besieged) and others. A characteristic of his work is that no poem except the Hymn to Liberty was completed, and almost nothing was published during his lifetime.

Nanos Valaoritis (born 1921) is one of the most distinguished writers in Greece today. He has been widely published as a poet, novelist and playwright since 1939, and his correspondence with George Seferis (Allilographia 1945-1968, Ypsilon, Athens 2004) has been a bestseller. Raised within a cosmopolitan family with roots in the Greek War of Independence but twice driven into exile by events, Valaoritis has lived in Greece, England, France and the United States, and as a writer and academic he has played a significant role in introducing the literary idioms of each country to the rest. The quality, the international appeal, and the influence of his work has led Valaoritis to be described as the most important poet of the Hellenic diaspora since Constantine Cavafy.

Kostas Varnalis (Greek: Κώστας Βάρναλης, 14 February 1884 – 16 December 1974) was a Greek poet.

Varnalis was born in Burgas, Bulgaria, in 1884. As his name suggests, his family originated from Varna. He completed his elementary studies in the Greek schools of Plovdiv and then moved to Athens to study literature at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. While there, he became involved in the language dispute, taking the side of the demoticists over the supportres of the katharevousa. After his graduation in 1908 he worked for some time as a teacher in Burgas, before returning to Greece and teaching in Amaliada and Athens. During the next years, he worked as a teacher and part-time journalist, also engaging in translation work. In 1913, he took part in the Second Balkan War.

In 1919 he gained a scholarship and travelled to Paris where he studied philosophy, literature and sociology. It was during his Parisian studies that he became a Marxist and reviewed his ideas on poetry in theory and in practice. His political alignment resulted in his being barred dismissed from his teaching position at the Paedagocical Academny in 1926, and to be barred from any state employment. Varnalis thus took to journalism, a profession he practised until the end of his life. In 1929, he married the poetess Dora Moatsou. In 1935, he participated in the Soviet Writers' Conference in Moscow as Greece's representative. Under the 4th of August Regime, he was sent to internal exile in Mytilene and Agios Efstratios. In 1959, he was awarded the Lenin Peace Prize. Varnalis died in Athens on 16 December 1974.

Vassilis Vassilikos (Greek: Βασίλης Βασιλικός, born November 18, 1934) is a prolific Greek writer and diplomat. A native of the northern Greek island of Thassos, Vassilikos grew up in Thessaloniki, graduating from law school there before moving to Athens to work as a journalist. Due to his political activities, he was forced into exile following the 1967 military coup, where he spent the next seven years.

Between 1981 and 1984 Vassilikos served as general manager of the Greek state television channel ET1. Since 1996, he has served as Greece's ambassador to UNESCO.

As an author, Vassilikos has been highly prolific and widely-translated. He has published more than 100 books, including novels, plays and poetry. His best known work is the political novel Z (1967) (English language ISBN 0-394-72990-0 or ISBN 0-941423-50-6), which has been translated into thirty-two languages and was the basis of the award-winning film Z directed by Costa-Gavras (with music by Mikis Theodorakis).