Alexis Lykiard

Alexis Lykiard (born 1940) is a British writer of Greek heritage, who began his prolific career as novelist and poet in the 1960s. His poems about jazz have received particular acclaim, including from Maya Angelou, Hugo Williams, Roy Fisher, Kevin Bailey and others. He is also known as translator of Isidore Ducasse, Comte de Lautréamont, Alfred Jarry, Antonin Artaud and many notable French literary figures. In addition, Lykiard has written two highly praised intimate memoirs of Jean Rhys: Jean Rhys Revisited (2000) and Jean Rhys: Afterwords (2006).

According to David Woolley of Poetry Wales: "As poet, novelist and translator, Alexis Lykiard has won many admirers over the years, but the early novels apart, his work has not received the popular attention it deserves. He has created a body of work that is erudite and witty but never obscure… Lykiard's language is vivid, breathtaking in its sheer physicality, while still suggesting more…"

He was born Constantinos Alexis Lykiardopoulos in Athens, Greece, in 1940, to a mother, Maria Casdagli who was from Salford (her family being involved with the Lancashire cotton industry), while his father Antonis Lykiardopoulos hailed from the island of Chios. Lykiard left Greece with his parents just after the German occupation, at the start of the four-year Greek Civil War, travelling via relatives in Egypt to England. He has lived since 1946 in the UK, where he learned English and was duly anglicised from the age of six.

In 1957, at the age of 17, he won the first Open English Scholarship ever awarded by King's College, Cambridge, graduating with a First-class Honours degree in 1962. While at Cambridge University, he was editor of the university magazine Granta (originally called The Granta).

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