HARIS VLAVIANOS was born in Rome in 1957 and grew up in Athens. He has published six collections of poetry, including The Angel of History (1999), which was short-listed for the State Poetry Prize, as was his most recent After the End of Beauty (2003). He has also published a collection of thoughts and aphorisms on poetry and poetics entitled The Other Place (1994). He has translated the works of many well-known writers including Walt Whitman, Ezra Pound, Michael Longley, Wallace Stevens, William Blake, e. e. cummings, Jonh Ashbery, Eugenio Montale, Zbigniew Herbert and Fernando Pessoa. He is the editor of the influential literary journal POETRY and of the Greek domain of the Poetry International website. His collection of poems Adieu (1996) has been translated into English by David Connolly and published in the U.K. by Birmingham University Press (1998), and volumes of his Selected Poems have been published in German, Dutch, Catalan and Italian (forthcoming).

"With this poet emotional and aesthetic answers can be glimpsed only out of the corner of the eye, in the margins. In Minima Poetica Vlavianos writes that 'Even the most complete poem is nothing but a fragment.' The length and intensity of his obsession with language has produced "fragments" which work like tesserae in a mosaic. Somehow they marry and merge, and the picture is realised: 'The leaf of reality. / The exquisite poem of the genuine."
—Michael Longley, from the Foreword