Giorgos Seferis

In 1914 the family moved to Athens, where Seferis completed his secondary school education.

He continued his studies in Paris from 1918 to 1925, studying law at the Sorbonne.

While he was there, in September 1922, Smyrna/Izmir was taken by the Turkish Army after a two-year Greek military campaign on Anatolian soil.

Many Greeks, including Seferis's family, fled from Asia Minor.

He returned to Athens in 1925 and was admitted to the Royal Greek Ministry of Foreign Affairs in the following year.

This was the beginning of a long and successful diplomatic career, during which he held posts in England (1931–1934) and Albania (1936–1938).

He married Maria Zannou ('Maro') on April 10, 1941 on the eve of the German invasion of Greece.

During the Second World War, Seferis accompanied the Free Greek Government in exile to Crete, Egypt, South Africa, and Italy, and returned to liberated Athens in 1944.

He continued to serve in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and held diplomatic posts in Ankara, Turkey (1948–1950) and London (1951–1953).

Seferis would not visit Smyrna again until 1950; the sense of being an exile from his childhood home would inform much of Seferis's poetry, showing itself particularly in his interest in the story of Odysseus.

Seferis was also greatly influenced by Kavafis, T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound.

He was appointed minister to Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and Iraq (1953–1956), and was Royal Greek Ambassador to the United Kingdom from 1957 to 1961, the last post before his retirement in Athens.

Seferis first visited Cyprus in November 1953.

He immediately fell in love with the island, partly because of its resemblance, in its landscape, the mixture of populations, and in its traditions, to his childhood summer home in Skala (Urla).

His book of poems Imerologio Katastromatos III was inspired by the island, and mostly written there–bringing to an end a period of six or seven years in which Seferis had not produced any poetry.

Its original title Cyprus, where it was ordained for me… (a quotation from Euripides' Helen in which Teucer states that Apollo has decreed that Cyprus shall be his home) made clear the optimistic sense of homecoming Seferis felt on discovering the island.

Romilly Jenkins nominated him in 1955, T.S. Eliot nominated him in 1961, Eyvind Johnson and Athanasius Trypanis Trypanis both nominated in 1962 and it was the 1963 nomination again by Eyvind Johnson that won him the prize.

He was 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.

Seferis was born in Vourla near Smyrna in Asia Minor, in the Aidin Vilayet of the Ottoman Empire (now İzmir, Turkey).

His father, Stelios Seferiadis, was a lawyer, and later a professor at the University of Athens, as well as a poet and translator in his own right.

He was also a staunch Venizelist and a supporter of the demotic Greek language over the formal, official language (katharevousa).

Both of these attitudes influenced his son.

Seferis changed the title in the 1959 edition of his poems.

Politically, Cyprus was entangled in the dispute between the UK, Greece and Turkey over its international status.

Over the next few years, Seferis made use of his position in the diplomatic service to strive towards a resolution of the Cyprus dispute, investing a great deal of personal effort and emotion.

This was one of the few areas in his life in which he allowed the personal and the political to mix.

Seferis described his political principles as "liberal and democratic [or republican]."

Seferis received many honours and prizes, among them honorary doctoral degrees from the universities of Cambridge (1960), Oxford (1964), Thessaloniki (1964), and Princeton (1965).

In 1963, Seferis was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature "for his eminent lyrical writing, inspired by a deep feeling for the Hellenic world of culture."

Seferis was nominated in total four times for the Nobel Prize.

In 1967 the repressive nationalist, right-wing Regime of the Colonels took power in Greece after a coup d'état.

After two years marked by widespread censorship, political detentions and torture, Seferis took a stand against the regime.

On March 28, 1969, he made a statement on the BBC World Service, with copies simultaneously distributed to every newspaper in Athens.

In authoritative and absolute terms, he stated "This anomaly must end".

Giorgos or George Seferis, the pen name of Georgios Seferiadis (Γεώργιος Σεφεριάδης; March 13 undefined 1900 – September 20, 1971), was a Greek poet and diplomat.

He was one of the most important Greek poets of the 20th century, and a Nobel laureate.

The other five finalists for the prize that year were W. H. Auden, Pablo Neruda (1971 winner), Samuel Beckett (1969 winner), Yukio Mishima and Aksel Sandemose.

Seferis was the first Greek to receive the prize (followed later by Odysseas Elytis, who became a Nobel laureate in 1979).

But in his acceptance speech, Seferis chose rather to emphasise his own humanist philosophy, concluding: "When on his way to Thebes Oedipus encountered the Sphinx, his answer to its riddle was: 'Man'. That simple word destroyed the monster. We have many monsters to destroy. Let us think of the answer of Oedipus."

While Seferis has sometimes been considered a nationalist poet, his 'Hellenism' had more to do with his identifying a unifying strand of humanism in the continuity of Greek culture and literature.