Constantine P. Cavafy

Konstantinos Petrou Kavafis was born in Alexandria on 29 April 1863 and spent his life there as a journalist and civil servant, writing poetry that would place him among the century's essential voices. He produced 154 poems in his canon, with dozens more left incomplete, but resisted every convention of literary ambition: no books, only newspapers, magazines, and broadsheets he printed himself and gave away. The work that mattered most came after his fortieth birthday. E. M. Forster introduced him to English readers in 1923, describing a Greek gentleman in a straw hat standing motionless at a slight angle to the universe. Cavafy died on his seventieth birthday, 29 April 1933. His poems - holding the historical and the erotic in a single embrace - were published two years later.