Katerina Iliopoulou

Katerina Iliopoulou was born in Athens on 21 February 1967 and still lives and works in the city. She is a poet, translator and editor, and she has also co-organised projects that bring poetry together with the visual arts and performance. Her name is sometimes written Katerína Iliopoúlou. She should not be confused with the poet and librettist Ioulita Iliopoulou, who has her own page on this site.

Her first poetry book, Mister T., appeared in 2007 from Melani editions in Athens. It was followed by Asylum in 2008 and Το βιβλίο του χώματος (The Book of the Soil) in 2011, both also from Melani. Profiles report that the literary magazine Diavazo gave her its award for a new author; they date it to 2007 or 2008. In 2012 Mister T. was published in French in Montreal as Monsieur T. and in Turkish in Istanbul, and her poems began to travel outside Greece.

In 2013 she became editor-in-chief of [ΦΡΜΚ] (also written FRMK or FaRMaKo), a new journal of poetry, theory and the visual arts published twice a year; its first issue appeared in the spring and summer of 2013. She also edits greekpoetrynow.com, a bilingual Greek and English site on contemporary Greek poetry, and is the Greek partner of Lyrikline, the international poetry website based in Berlin. In 2025 she read at the Lisbon Revisited poetry days of the Casa Fernando Pessoa.

Place is at the centre of Iliopoulou’s poetry, linked to the body, history, memory, myth and women’s experience of the world. The Book of the Soil shows this clearly. In Ταίναρο (Cape Tainaron), the speaker reaches the southern cape that ancient Greeks saw as a gate to the underworld. The wind rushes into her mouth until all her words vanish; she sits down, bends her head and looks at the soil, where thyme roots struggle through the cracks towards the light, and then the words return. Other poems in the book follow a small swimmer’s dive or recall the Hungarian photographer André Kertész walking city streets.

Gestus (2014), from FRMK Books, pairs her poems with photographs by Yiannis Isidorou. Μια φορά κάθε τοπίο και ολότελα (Every Place Only Once, and Completely, 2015) contains a sequence called Νότος (South), with poems of roads, shepherds and passing. She has since published a short-story collection (2018) and Lily Crag (2021), and a novel, Parandé, has been announced by Hestia for 2026. As a translator, working with Eleni Iliopoulou, she has brought Sylvia Plath’s Ariel in its restored edition (2012) and a bilingual selection from Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass (2019) into Greek. She has also translated Mina Loy, Robert Hass and Ted Hughes.

Iliopoulou’s influence works largely through other people’s reading. The journal [ΦΡΜΚ], the bilingual site greekpoetrynow.com and her work for Lyrikline carry contemporary Greek poems to readers and translators in Greece and abroad, and her Plath and Whitman translations give Greek readers new access to two major English-language poets. For a learner, Ταίναρο (Cape Tainaron) is a good first poem: the Greek text is on Lyrikline and on the Lisbon Revisited pages of the Casa Fernando Pessoa, beside translations. Find the line Έσκυψα το κεφάλι μου και κοίταξα το χώμα (I bent my head and looked at the soil). Then write three sentences of your own, one each with χώμα (soil), γη (earth, land) and έδαφος (ground), and compare them with the examples in this page’s Greek passage.

• Her poem Ταίναρο is set at the cape that ancient Greeks saw as a gate to Hades.
• Her first book, Mister T., also appeared in French as Monsieur T. in Montreal in 2012.
• She has directed the journal [ΦΡΜΚ] since its first issue in 2013.
• She translated Sylvia Plath’s Ariel together with Eleni Iliopoulou.