About the Author: Nikos Kazantzakis

Nikos Kazantzakis (Greek: Νίκος Καζαντζάκης) was a prolific Greek writer, whose works include essays, novels, poems, tragedies, travel books, and translations of such classics as Dante's The Divine Comedy and J.W. von Goethe's Faust.

Like his hero, Odysseus, Kazantzakis lived most of his artistic life outside Greece-except for the years of World War II. "I am a mariner of Odysseus with heart of fire but with mind ruthless and clear," Kazantzakis wrote in TODA RABA (1934).

Several of the author's novels deal with the history and culture of his own country, and the mystical relationship between man and God. In 1957 he lost the Nobel Prize by a single vote to the French writer Albert Camus.