Award-winning poet and lyricist Michalis Ganas, whose works have been widely translated and set to music by renowned Greek composers such as Mikis Theodorakis, Nikos Xydakis, and Dimitris Papadimitriou, has passed away at the age of 80.
In 1994, he received the Second State Poetry Prize for his work “Paralogi”, and in 2011, the Academy of Athens honored him for his entire body of poetic work.
Born in 1944 in a mountain village in Epirus, northwestern Greece, Ganas moved to Athens to study law. After graduating, he soon shifted his focus to literature, a passion he had shown signs of as early as primary school.
He found employment at bookstores in Athens, wrote copy for advertising, and began crafting lyrics for songs.
“Literature saved me,” Ganas once recalled. “I finished law school but didn’t enjoy it. Essentially, I had no real profession.”
Poetry collections by Ganas have been translated into Albanian, French, German and Italian. Additionally, his poems have featured in anthologies across numerous languages – English, Bulgarian, Chinese, Czech, Finnish, French, Georgian, German, Hungarian, Italian, Polish, Romanian and Spanish.
