Yannis Ritsos is the most prolific poet of modern Greece, with an oeuvre exceeding 6,200 pages of verse in over 100 collections. He also authored a nine-volume series of autobiographical prose novelettes, as well as essays on poetics, and translations of Russian, Czech, Slovak, Romanian, Turkish, Persian, Cuban, and Chilean writers into modern Greek. He ranks as one of the four great poets of twentieth-century Greece (with Constantine Cavafy, George Seferis, and Odysseas Elytis) whose works have reached an international audience through wide translation. Selections of Ritsos' poetry have been translated into 45 languages. In 1977 he received the Lenin Prize for Peace from the USSR, on display in the Benaki Museum in Athens alongside the Nobel Prizes for Literature awarded to Seferis and Elytis. Ritsos' many other awards and achievements include Le Grand Prix...
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Citation: Newton, Rick M.. "Yannis Ritsos". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 21 January 2009 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=12235, accessed 09 June 2026.]
