Stratis Tsirkas

Yiannis Hatziandreas , better known by his pen name, Stratis Tsirkas, was a Modern Greek poet, novelist, literary critic, and translator who was born in and grew up in Cairo, Egypt as a member of Egypt's Greek community. In 1938, he moved to the culturally mixed and cosmopolitan society of Alexandria, on Egypt's Mediterranean coast, where he managed a factory and became active in the city's vibrant literary scene. There he befriended the eminent Egypt-born Greek poet Constantine P. Cavafy, whom he had first met in 1930, and about whom he later wrote two books. Tsirkas received most acclaim for his trilogy of novels called Drifting Cities. Set in Alexandria, Cairo, and Jerusalem during World War II, Drifting Cities has appeared in many translations, including Arabic, English, French, Italian, Romanian, Spanish, Turkish, and German. Active in left-wing politics, Tsirkas belonged to the Communist Party until its leaders expelled him for critically portraying the party's authoritarian culture in The Club, the first volume in his Drifting Cities trilogy, which appeared in Greek in 1961. He emigrated to Greece in 1963 and died in Athens in 1980. Observers have hailed him as a "towering figure in contemporary Greek literature."