Yorgos Markopoulos was born in Messini (Peloponnese) in 1951 and has lived in Athens since 1965. He studied economics. He has published seven collections of poetry, one collection of short stories, two volumes of texts on the work of other poets, two monographs (one on football in Greek poetry and one on the work of the poet Tassos Liivaditis). In 1996 he was awarded the Cavafy Prize in Alexandria, Egypt, and in 1999 the Greek State Poetry Prize for the poetry collection Do not Cover the River. In 2011 he was awarded the Greek State Poetry Prize for the collection Hidden Hunter, while in the same year he was honored with the Prize of the Academy of Athens by the Costas and Eleni Ourani Foundation for all his work.