Nikos Kazantzakis

Nikos Kazantzakis was a Greek novelist, poet, philosopher, and translator whose work brought modern Greek literature to a wide international audience. His best-known novels include Zorba the Greek, The Last Temptation of Christ, Christ Recrucified, and Captain Michalis, and he also produced a long modernist epic, The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel, which extends Homer's hero into a restless metaphysical wanderer.

Born in 1883 in Heraklion on Crete, he studied law in Athens and philosophy in Paris under Henri Bergson, whose ideas about creative impulse left a lasting mark on his thought. He travelled widely through Europe, Asia, and the Middle East, working as a journalist and producing essays and travel books that interleaved political reporting with reflections on belief, will, and asceticism.

His religious novels drew sharp reaction. The Last Temptation of Christ was placed on the Catholic Index of Forbidden Books and prompted an attempt by some inside the Greek Orthodox Church to excommunicate him. He answered the threat with the line, often repeated in later editions, that he hoped his readers would understand his work as an act of faith rather than its negation.

He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature multiple times and lost the 1957 award to Albert Camus by a single vote, according to later accounts by Camus himself. He died in Freiburg that same year and is buried on the walls of Heraklion.

The forename Nikos is the standard Greek short form of Nikolaos, from nike, meaning victory, and laos, meaning people, traditionally rendered as "victory of the people." It remains one of the most common male given names in Greece, and his international reputation has made it familiar to readers far beyond the Greek-speaking world.