Kiki Dimoula

Born and raised in Athens, Greece, Kiki Dimoula worked for many years at the Bank of Greece before leaving to care for her two children full-time. Her first collection of poems translated into English was The Brazen Plagiarist: Selected Poems (2012, translated by Cecile I. Margellos and Rika Lesser). Earlier collections include Farewell Never (1988) and Lethe’s Adolescence (1994).

Dimoula explored both syntax and memory in her poetry, restlessly searching for forms to contain grief, intimacy, and uncertainty. In a New York Times feature, Rachel Donadio described Dimoula’s poetry as “spare, profound, unsentimental, effortlessly transforming the quotidian into the metaphysical, drawing on the powerful themes of time, fate and destiny, yet making them entirely her own.”

 

Dimoula was a full member of the Academy of Athens, and her honors include the European Prize for Literature, Greece’s Grand National Prize for lifetime achievement, two Greek National Poetry Prizes, and the Academy of Athens’s Ouranis Prize as well as its Aristeion of Letters. She lived in Athens until her death in early 2020.

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