Manolis’ vibrant and radiant poems are infused by a powerful yet subtle music that resonates with the reader who revels for the vitality of the sensuous motion of the language he uses to present images structured in a mixture of Mediterranean and Canadian formats. Poems that make the reader discover the poet’s cosmos as it expands from the microcosm to the universal. Images which declare that everything vanishes as it flows through people’s fingers, yet from all these some become eternal in their wholeness, like the child’s smile which cannot be stained by life’s conditioning, the child’s smile that cannot be blemished by the adulthood’s guilt and banal everyday littleness. Manolis’ poetry stands out among his contemporaries as this poet descends from the ancient modes and exemplary structures from which he draws and which he transposes to us in his personal poetic way.

Emmanuel Aligizakis, (Manolis) is a Cretan-Canadian poet and author. He was recently appointed an honorary instructor and fellow of the International Arts Academy, and awarded a Master’s for the Arts in Literature. Born in the village of Kolibari on the island of Crete in 1947, he moved with his family at a young age to Thessaloniki and then to Athens, where he received his Bachelor of Arts in Political Sciences from the Panteion University of Athens. After graduation, he served in the armed forces for two years and emigrated to Vancouver in 1973, where he worked as an iron worker, train labourer, taxi driver, and stock broker, and studied English Literature at Simon Fraser University. He has written three novels and numerous collections of poetry, which are steadily being released as published works. His poetry has been translated into Romanian, Swedish, German, Hungarian, Ukrainian, French, Portuguese, Arabic, Turkish, Serbian, Russian, Italian, Chinese, Japanese, languages and has been published in book form or in magazines in various countries. He now lives in White Rock, where he spends his time writing, gardening, traveling, and heading Libros Libertad, an unorthodox and independent publishing company which he founded in 2006 with the mission of publishing literary books.
His translation of George Seferis: Collected Poems was shortlisted for the Greek National Literary Awards the highest literary recognition of Greece. In September 2017 he was awarded the First Poetry Prize of the Mihai Eminescu International Poetry Festival, in Craiova, Romania.