The Academy of Athens elected prominent Greek poet Titos Patrikios as honorary member during its plenary session on Thursday.

A statement of the Academy on Athens on the poet's biography mentions the following:

Titos Patrikios was born in 1928 and belongs to the so-called first post-WWII era of Greek poets. Between his earliest poetic writings and his latest poetry collection Greece went through the German occupation in WWII, the Civil War, the Cyprus issue, the 1967 dictatorship, the post-junta era, and the years up to the arrival of the recent coronavirus pandemic.

Titos Patrikios graduated from Athens Law School, and published his first poetry collection "The Dirt Road" (O Chomatrodromos) in 1954. He also studied sociology and philosophy at the École Pratique des Hautes Études in the Sorbonne, and was hired as researcher at CNRS. He returned to Greece in 1964 and left again after the coup on April 21, 1967, working for UNESCO and the United Nations.

In 1975 he returned to Greece as a practising lawyer. Twenty of his poetry collections were published in a two-volume anthology and released by the Kichli publishing house (2017, 2018, respectively). His most recent collection, "The Road, Again", was published in September 2020. Titos Patrikios has also published four short story collections and five books of translated works by Louis Aragon, Stendhal, Balzac, and Paul Valery. His poetry has been translated into Albanian, English, French, German, Italian, Romanian, Serbian, and Spanish.

Patrikios has been awarded several Greek and international prizes, while in 2004 Italian President Carlo Azeglio Ciampi bestowed on him the honorary title of Cavalliere dell' Ordine della Stella Soliedarità Italiana for his contribution to Greek-Italian cultural relations.

He was also awarded the international prize Lerici Pea and a medal by Italian President Giorgio Napolitano (2013), and the international prizes Fondazione Roma of Italy and of Max Jacob of France (both in 2015). In 2019, President of the Hellenic Republic Prokopios Pavlopoulos bestowed on him the Order of Honor, Commander Class, while in the same year French Culture Minister Frank Riester honored him with the title Officier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.

The Academy of Athens described him as "a poet of ideas and daily moments, political and erotic, a sharp observer of other and self-observing" and "the wise humanist of Greek contemporary poetry who understand 'the right timing of words'."
 

(Photo courtesy of the Academy of Athens)