Galatea Kazantzaki was born Galatea Alexiou (1884–1962) in Heraklion Crete, she was the daughter of publisher and author Stylianos Alexiou and sister of author, novelist and academic Ellie Alexiou. Galatea Kazantzaki was a prolific female author who sadly remains largely unknown in Anglophone literature.

The renown scholar Dr Anna Fyta, an expert in Modernist poetry and the reception of Greek Classics, will present an online lecture on Galatea Kazantzaki, on Thursday, March 9 for the Greek Community of Melbourne seminar program. The presentation will be conducted in English and will be available through Facebook and YouTube.

This largely neglected modernist female author, was hobbled by her surname, Kazantzaki, which is associated with her first husband the globally recognised author of Zorba the Greek, Nikos Kazantzakis. Under her husband’s shadow, she did not receive the recognition she deserved as a female author. The lecture will introduce on Galatea Kazantzaki’s first years when she penned her first works in a male dominated literary scene.

Galatea Kazantzaki was a prolific female authorial who remains an understudied Greek writers in Anglophone literature.

Her emergence and consistent contribution to Greek literature, journalism, and political activism was often derided as lacking the rigor of her male counterparts. The lecture will provide a close look at her multifaceted, idiosyncratic approaches to poetry, translation, essay, novel and drama.

Galatea Kazantzaki published during the period of Greek aestheticism and modernism, and her works span through the decades of interwar years, the German occupation of Greece and post-World War II developments, until her untimely death in 1962. Dr Fyta’s lecture will seek to shed new light on this important female author whose impact and artistic value are still pending appreciation and acknowledgement from the global community.

Dr Fyta’s doctoral research work centers on Modernist poetry and the reception of Greek Classics. Her thesis explores the dialogue of the American Modernist poet H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) with ancient Greek dramatist Euripides.

Parts of her research and academic work involve the conversations of American women poets with classical Hellenism and Greek mythology. Her essay on H.D.’s “Translation as Mythopoesis: Helen in Egypt as Meta-Palinode,” was published in The Classics in Modernist Translation (2019) by Bloomsbury Academic.

In her article “Dramatic Heterotopias and Transformations of Mythic Space” appeared in the journal Ex-centric Narratives (Aristotle U., 2020), she interprets Joan Jonas’s post-conceptual project Lines in the Sand alongside H.D.’s epic poem Helen in Egypt. Dr Fyta’s essay “Galatea Kazantzaki Alexiou (1884–1962): A Modernist Greek Author’s Decadent Poetics” (2021) appeared in Feminist Modernist Studies.

As guest editor, she is currently working on a special issue of Ex-centric Narratives: Journal of Anglophone Literature, Culture and Media published by Aristotle University in Thessaloniki. Anna Fyta teaches English and American Literature at Athens College, Greece.

When: Thursday, 9 March at 7pm

Where: Online via Facebook, YouTube