Vasiliki “Kiki” Dimoula, famous Greek poet and Academy of Athens member, has died at the age of 88.
After being hospitalised for 20 days, the acclaimed poet passed away on her hospital bed after suffering a heart attack. She died shortly before 6 p.m. Saturday, the announcement says.
Kiki Dimoula was born in Athens on June 6, 1931, working at the Bank of Greece from 1949 to 1973.
By the 1960’s, Dimoula’s reputation as a highly regarded artist had been firmly established and, since the 1970s, she has received many awards, including the European Prize for Literature in 2009.
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“I use humour to exorcize death,” she once explained.
“Poetry can make absence into presence. I call on the dead. I invoke death.”
She also became a member of the Athens Academy in 2002, the third woman to be elected at the Literature chair.
Dimoula described her writing methods at an event in 2007, where observed the natural born chaos of the world and worked to try and impose some order. Poetry, she believed, exists: “It isn’t made by poets, who are not creators but explorers, each in their own way.”
