Antonis Fostieris

Antonis Fostieris was born in Athens in 1953 and has family roots on Amorgos. He studied law in Athens and the history of law in Paris. His first collection, Το Μεγάλο Ταξίδι (The Great Journey), appeared in 1971. Publishing other writers became a parallel activity: he directed Η Νέα Ποίηση (New Poetry) from 1974 to 1976 and worked with Thanasis Niarchos on the annual publication Ποίηση (Poetry) from 1975 to 1981. In January 1981, their partnership began Η Λέξη (The Word), a literary magazine they published and directed until 2010.

His literary work includes translation and the preparation of anthologies as well as his own poems. He translated Max Jacob's Συμβουλές σ’ ένα νέο ποιητή (Advice to a Young Poet), published in Greek in 1984. With Niarchos, he assembled Έλληνες ποιητές για τη θάλασσα (Greek Poets on the Sea, 1997). His poetry has also entered school literature textbooks in Greece and Cyprus and been recorded in his own voice. Πολύτιμη Λήθη (Precious Oblivion, 2003) received the State Poetry Prize in 2004. The Academy of Athens awarded him the Ouranis Prize for his body of work in 2010. Democritus University of Thrace now provides a digital collection from his personal literary archive.

Fostieris's poems move between feeling and thought, often making an apparently familiar word carry an unsettling second meaning. Titles such as Πολύτιμη Λήθη (Precious Oblivion, 2003) bring together ideas that seem to pull in opposite directions. Τοπία του Τίποτα (Landscapes of Nothing, 2013) extends this questioning of what exists and what language can capture. In Θάνατος ο Δεύτερος (Death the Second, 2020), the title comes from the Book of Revelation, while the poems bring mortality into contact with the value of life, time, silence and speech.

His language combines contemporary Greek with words and references from earlier periods. In a 2022 interview with Elpidoforos Intzebelis, he explained this mixture as a way of making the historical continuity of Greek work inside a poem. The result can demand close attention to context, sound and ambiguity. The short reading here offers adapted everyday Greek before that more difficult encounter.

The collected Άπαντα – Τα ποιήματα 1970–2020 (Complete Poems 1970–2020, 2021) gathers ten collections. Ποίηση και Ποιητική (Poetry and Poetics, 2026) brings together interviews, conversations and prose reflections on writing. Alongside his poems, these discussions reveal an author thinking about how a poem takes shape and how its reader participates.

Fostieris remains accessible through school anthologies, his recorded readings and the digital archive at Democritus University of Thrace. That archive connects poems with manuscripts, literary magazines and visual responses by artists. For a small language task, open Kastaniotis's page for Άπαντα – Τα ποιήματα 1970–2020 (Complete Poems 1970–2020) and find Πολύτιμη Λήθη (Precious Oblivion) in its list of collections. Look up λήθη, meaning forgetting, and its opposite μνήμη, memory. Then write two everyday sentences of your own beginning Θυμάμαι and Ξεχνώ: remember a name, forget an address. Replace the objects and read the sentences aloud. This gives a practical use for a literary title before attempting the poems themselves.

• Η Λέξη means The Word: a fitting name for the magazine he ran with Thanasis Niarchos.
• Max Jacob's advice to young poets is among his translations.
• The university archive includes manuscripts as well as recordings of the poet reading.