The Australian Greek poet Dimitris Tsaloumas has died on the island of Leros, where he was born 94 years ago.
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Tsaloumas came to Melbourne in 1952 and lived in Elwood for many years. He had for a long time spent a large chunk of each year on his home island, and had lived there for the past three years.
He studied at the University of Melbourne, taught modern languages and English in high schools. He had published two collections in Greece before migrating to Australia, but didn't resume his writing until 1974. He wrote in Greek and English, with his first English selection, The Observatory, translated by Philip Grundy, being published in 1983. Since then eight collections have been published in English and three more in Greek and English.
He won a National Book Council award for The Observatory and later the Patrick White award for a writer deemed not to have been sufficiently recognised.
Many of his books were published by the University of Queensland Press. Former UQP general manager Laurie Muller said the two had become genuine friends.
"I thought his stuff was outstanding. He was really a man of two countries. When he was teaching at secondary college he used to call himself 'Dimitris Silly Mouse' because he said the students couldn't ever master his name."
Muller said when he had stayed with Tsaloumas at his home on Leros he had been an incredibly generous host.
His most recent book, A Winter Journey, was published by Owl Publishing. Owl publisher Helen Nickas, who first met him in 1984 when she began an honours thesis about his work, described Tsaloumas as a deep thinker.
"He was very warm and interested in everything. He was always very political and when he came back from Greece would describe to me the political situation there. But he wasn't divided between the two countries; he loved Australia. But he really wanted to live half the time here and half the time there.
"His poetry had an epigrammatic nature – he wanted to say as much as possible with the least amount of words."
A Winter Journey, which was a bilingual edition of a suite of 14 poems from his 2007 English-language collection, Helen of Troy and Other Poems. Tsaloumas had four children, two of whom live in Melbourne, one in Greece and one in Canada.
