Author Thanasis Valtinos has passed

He was a member of the Academy of Athens and was elected its president in 2016.

It appeared in letters in the 1950s and became established in the following years with great books that were discussed, such as "Orthokosta", "Synaxari of Andreas Kordopatis" and "Deep blue, almost black".

He was born in Kastri Kynourias in 1932.

During the occupation and the civil war his family moved to different cities. From 1950 he lived in Athens, where he attended courses at the Political Science department of Panteion University and at a cinema school.

He first appeared in literature in 1958 with the short story "Katakalokiro" in a competition of the magazine Tachydromos.

In 1963 he published the short story "The Descent of the Nine", which referred to the civil war.

During the April dictatorship, he participated in the resistance publication "18 Texts".

After 1974 he lived intermittently abroad: England, West Berlin and the USA, invited by universities or other intellectual institutions.

In 1990 he was awarded the State Prize for Fiction for the book "Evidence for the 1960s".

In 1994, the book "Orthokosta" was published, on the subject of the civil war, which caused intense debates.

He was also a collaborator of the Art Theater of Karolos Koun, but also of Theodoros Angelopoulos. He was even honored with the screenplay prize at the Cannes festival for "Journey to Kythira" in 1984.

Finally, he collaborated with magazines such as Thachydromos, Epochs, The Continuity, The Word, The Read, Ausblicke, Anti and Map, as well as newspapers (Daily, Avgi).

On June 5, 2008, he was elected a regular member of the Academy of Athens, in the chair of New Greek Prose of the Class of Letters and Fine Arts. In December 2012 he was awarded the Great State Prize for Literature for his entire work.

He was also a member of the European Academy of Sciences and Arts, the Society of Greek Playwrights, as well as the Writers' Society of which he was president for a number of years. He was General Manager of ERT-2 between 1989-1990.

In 2022, the President of the Republic awarded medals to 11 important personalities of letters and the arts, including Thanasis Valtinos.

For the award-winning author, he emphasized that he "enriched our secretariat with a work in which history, politics and society are strongly intertwined with ego and individuality. With his narrative austerity, the deluge of his pages with the action and passions of ordinary people, the pioneering use of evidence as literary material, but above all with the ministry of the Greek language in a way capable of restoring its freedom from the estuary to the its sources, changed the course of the modern Greek novel".