It is with deep sadness that the President of the Republic Katerina Sakellaropoulou bids farewell to the writer Thanasis Valtinos, to whom two years ago she had awarded the Commander of the Order of the Phoenix, honoring his multifaceted contribution to Greek literature.

In particular, with a post on Facebook, PtD states:

“It is with deep sadness that I say goodbye to Thanasis Valtinos, prose writer, screenwriter and translator of ancient drama, an author with a very important and varied contribution to Greek literature.

His narrative austerity, the flooding of his pages by the action and suffering of ordinary people, his constant, feverish dialogue with history, his pioneering use of evidence as literary material, and above all his approach to the Greek language as a living memory of meanings that sustain Hellenism in its timelessness, changed the course of the modern Greek novel.

From “Descent of the Nine” to “Evidence for the 60s” and from “Synaxari of Andreas Kordopatis” to “Deep Blue Almost Black”, “Orthokosta” and the masterpiece “The Last Varlamis”, Thanasis Valtinos showed us, as he himself had said, that high literature “does not prophesy, but senses what is imminent and carries its own chills”.