About

I’m Chris and…

I’m a teacher, poet and translator. I was born in London in the 1980s and grew up in Crete in the 1990s. I had an Atari and I listened to both grunge and rave music.

I think the first thing I ever wrote was inspired by The Hobbit and was a set of rhyming quatrains about two elves. Although I’ve never given up on what is sometimes pejoratively called ‘fantasy’, I’ve since diversified. Much of my writing is inspired by travel, sound and space, the natural world, and at times the hidden, the mythic and the otherworldly. I write because, as Rilke suggested, I cannot do otherwise. My writing has appeared in various journals and anthologies in Greece, the UK, Italy, Ireland and Canada. My first collection of poetry (mainly in Greek) was published in July 2022 by Saixpirikon Publications in Thessaloniki. I also perform and read my own poetry, as well as that of others, at various venues and events. I love to explore the intersection of poetry, animation and music and (with snail patience) have been trying to complete a collaborative motion poetry project based on the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice.

For the last 15 years or so, I have also been involved in some kind of teaching. I started out in education working as a private tutor for English, History and 11+ Exams, and at the same time as a skills trainer in Maths and English for young offenders and other NEET learners. I went on to work as an English teacher in a secondary school in London, an EFL teacher in Italy and an editorial assistant for an educational publisher in Greece. I have an academic interest in Imaginative Education (IE) as put forward by Kieran Egan and educational policies aimed at making school curricula more meaningful and engaging for teachers and learners alike.

The third string to my bow is academic and literary translation. While still a student in London in the noughties, I got to proofread translations from Greek to English and vice versa, including of books by such names as Harold Pinter and Soti Triantafyllou. I was lucky enough to meet and work with Sarah Maguire at the Poetry Translation Centre, attending translation workshops that I still remember vividly. I currently translate poetry, fiction and hybrid forms of creative writing, as well as academic research papers and articles, especially from the Humanities, Social Sciences, Music and Medicine. I grew up bilingual, so moving between Greek and English comes naturally to me, and in the past 5 years I have also acquired enough Italian to be able to add that to the mix. My approach to translation favours clarity of expression, pragmatics and musicality over a strictly literal rendering of meaning.

This website is really an attempt to unify these three ‘roles’ into one coherent entity. It’s been a bit of a struggle in the past, especially since my personality naturally tends towards fragmentation and separation. I guess I now feel it more as a themed triptych, or a triple spiral, with each part feeding into the whole and complimenting the other two.