Nationality Greek Period 1979– | Name Dimosthenis Kourtovik Role Writer | |
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Books Hoi prosokratikoi philosophoi, Helleniko Hangover Nominations State Literary Award for Best Short Story - Novella Similar People Wolf Biermann, Thanos Mikroutsikos, Geoffrey Kirk | ||
Dimosthenis Kourtovik (Greek: Δημοσθένης Κούρτοβικ; born 1948) is a Greek writer, literary critic and anthropologist. He studied biology in Athens and West Germany and specialized later on physical anthropology. In 1986 he obtained a doctoral degree from the University of Wroclaw, Poland, with a thesis on the evolution of human sexuality.
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He has plied several occupations, from night watchman to university teaching, from translator to film and literary critic. In the period 1973–75 he was co-founder, director and actor of the "Greek Workers' Stage" in Stuttgart, Germany. Between 1990 and 1995 he taught at the University of Crete the subjects of history of human sexuality, sexual semiotics in art and animal behaviour. Today he works as literary critic for the Athens daily 'Ta Nea'.
He has published until now 19 books (novels, short stories, essays, reviews, aphorisms, literary dictionaries, scientific treatises and textbooks). He also has translated 63 books from eight foreign languages (English, German, French, Italian, Finnish, Swedish, Danish and Norwegian). Several of his novels and short stories were translated into German, French, English, Danish, Swedish, Czech, Romanian, Serbian, Bulgarian, Hebrew, and Polish.
Τhe following versions of his name also occur in other languages: Demosthenes Kourtovik, Dimosthenis Kurtovik, Demosthenes Kurtovik, Démosthène Kourtovik.
He lives in Athens.
Prose
Moreover, several short stories are included in theme anthologies or published in newspapers.
Essays, aphorisms, literary criticism
Treatises
Translations
Among the 63 books, both fiction and non-fiction, that he has translated are works by Daniel Defoe, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, E.T.W Hoffmann, Lord Byron, Giacomo Leopardi, Edgar Allan Poe, Jules Verne, Algernon Blackwood, Bertolt Brecht, Daphne Du Maurier, Karel Čapek, Jens Bjørneboe, Veijo Meri, Eeva Kilpi, Martti Joenpolvi, Erich Fried, Wolf Biermann, Julian Barnes, Peter Høeg et al. He has also edited anthologies of German short stories, Finnish short stories and Finnish poetry, and he has translated poems of Desmond Egan, Inger Christensen, Henrik Nordbrandt, and Doris Kareva. Non-fiction authors translated by him include Ibn Khaldun, Max Weber, Walter Benjamin, Egon Friedell, Werner Heisenberg, John Maynard Smith, Siegfried Kracauer, Paul Klee, Herbert Marcuse, Ernest Borneman, Hans-Georg Beck, E.J.Hobsbawm and many others.
His works in translation
In French:
In German:
In English:
In Danish:
In Swedish:
In Czech
In Romanian:
In Serbian:
In Bulgarian:
In Hebrew:
In Polish: