Luntemes, Menelaos

Born Oct. 25, 1912, in Constantinople. Greek writer.

Luntemes began his literary career in 1934. His first collection of short stories, The Ships Did Not Moor (1938), which received the state literary prize, the short-story collections Waiting for the Rainbow (1940) and The Dawn (1944), and the novella Ecstasy (1943) depict the life of the working people. A number of works portraying the hard life of the unfortunate contain autobiographical elements, notably the novellas Good Night, Life (1946) and The Clouds Are Gathering (1948) and the novel The Boy Counts the Stars (vols. 1-2, 1956-57; Russian translation, 1959).

During World War II, Luntemes fought in the resistance movement in Greece against the Italian and German occupation forces. Opposing the intervention of American and British imperialists in Greek affairs, Luntemes was persecuted after the war and spent the years from 1948 to 1956 in a concentration camp and in exile. He has been living in Rumania since 1959. Among his other important works are the short-story collections Those Who Brought the Fog (1946) and Sad Days (1953), the verse collections The Cry of the Universe (1954) and I Sing About Cyprus (1956), the antifascist play Lightning (1958), and the novel The Street of the Abyss (1962). His novel The Clocks of the World Strike Midnight, first published in Rumanian in 1961 (a Greek edition appeared in 1963), deals with the threat of fascism and the struggle of peoples for peace. Luntemes was elected a member of the World Peace Council in 1956.