Writer. The firstborn son of merchant and landowner Michalis Kazantzakis, he had two sisters. Upon finishing school, in 1902 he left Herakleion for Athens, enrolled in the Law School of the University of Athens and graduated with distinction in 1906. That was also the year of his first texts to be published in Pinakothiki magazine under the nom-deplume Karma Nirvani, with which he published his first book, Serpent and lily, dedicated to Galatia Alexiou. From 1907 to 1909 he wrote his first plays (among which Day is breaking, Fasga, The master builder), the novel Broken souls and various studies and essays, all published in contemporary magazines (Noumas, Panathinaea). In 1909 he published in Herakleion his dissertation on Friedrich Nietzsche on the Philosophy of Right and the State. In the summer of 1917 he made an unsuccessful attempt at running a lignite mine in Mani with miner Yorgis Zorbas, and in the autumn he travelled to Switzerland where he had a love affair with Eleni Lambridou. In 1919, as Director General of the Ministry of Welfare, he worked for the repatriation of the Greeks of Caucasus and met Eleftherios Venizelos in Paris. The next three years he travelled around Europe and Greece, participated in the Education Reformers’ Convention in Berlin and the Sex Education Convention in Dresden, studies the works of Freud, met Lev Shestov and wrote The Saviors of God. In 1924 he met Eleni Samiou. Between October 1925 and February 1926 he stayed in Russia as correspondent of the Eleftheros Logos newspaper. There were two more journeys to Russia, Italy and Spain (1926, 1932-1933, 1936-1937, 1950), to Egypt and Sinai (1927). In 1926 he divorced Galatia and travelled with Eleni to Palestine and Cyprus. The same year he published a first sample of Odyssey, first completed in 1927 in Aegina but not published until December 1938, after seven rewritings. He continued to travel with Eleni to Germany, Czechoslovakia, France, Spain, Japan, China and England, returning from time to time to Aegina (1943-1944) and Athens (1945). In 1946 he settled in France, first in Paris (as literary advisor at UN- ESCO’s headquarters) and then in Antibes. That year he was nominated for the Nobel Prize, together with Angelos Sikelianos. His publications between 1928-1944 include Toda Raba, the History of Russian literature, Tertsines, his translations of Dante’s Divine Comedy and Goethe’s Faust I, The Rock garden, the tragedy Melissa, and travel memoirs. In France he wrote The Fratricides and Capetan Michalis, and in 1953 he completed the novel Christ Recrucified, which was ill-received by both the Greek Church and the Vatican; that year he was hospitalised in Paris for a lymphatic disorder. In 1954, Zorba the Greek won the best foreign-language novel prize in France. In 1955 he travelled to Alsace, where he met Albert Schweizer, and to Lugano, where he began the Report to Greco, which was published posthumously. In 1956 the Greek Popular Theatre of Manos katrakis produced a successful stage adaptation of Christ Recrucified, and in 1957 the Jules Dassin film Celui qui doit mourir, based on the same book, was screened at Cannes; Kazantzakis attended the premiere. On the occasion of the Nikos Kazantzakis Year upon the 60th anniversary of his death, ANALOGIO 2017 organized a Tribute in collaboration with Kazantzakis Editions, with three events inspired by his unique oeuvre: “Report to Greco”, a walking performance by Geert Vermeire in Plaka, in collaboration with The Milena Principle; a stage presentation, in collaboration with the Cervantes Institute, of Don Quixote, an unknown script by Kazantzakis, directed by Spyros Vrachoritis and Sissy Papathanassiou; and a round-table discussion on “An unknown script. The cinematic scripts by Nikos Kazantzakis”.