The Markos Synodinos Award
For Literary Service to Greece
This award is not submitted for. It is not voted on. It is given. Given annually by Rania Stone and Jonas Saul to a writer whose work demonstrates the same quality that Markos Synodinos embodied throughout his life — a profound, earned, and generous engagement with Greece.
Its landscape. Its mythology. Its philosophy. Its people. And the ancient belief that stories are how civilizations understand themselves.
It is presented last of all at the Homer Awards gala. Because some things should be saved for the end.
Markos Synodinos 1933 – 2021
Markos Synodinos was born in 1933 on Amorgos, a small island in the Aegean that has been inhabited since antiquity and has never stopped producing people of unusual depth.
He was a poet, a writer, and a man who believed that literature exists to tell the truth about the human condition — lyrical and epic simultaneously, rooted in the ancient tradition of Greek letters and driven by an urgent, lifelong engagement with peace and justice in the world.
His works are held in libraries beyond Greece. Many have been set to music. He was honored by the Society of Greek Writers, the Academy of Letters of Sicily, and the Panhellenic Union of Writers.
He passed away in March 2021 at the age of 88, leaving behind a body of work that his island, Amorgos, mourned as a collective loss.
A personal note
This award is given annually in his name by his daughter, Rania Stone. It is presented to a writer whose work Markos Synodinos would have wanted to honor — someone who has engaged with Greece not as a backdrop or a postcard, but as a living thing with a soul.
The category is wide because Markos Synodinos was wide. Any writer — published or not, thriller or literary, Greek or international — whose work demonstrates that quality is eligible.
AMORGOS
Amorgos is the easternmost island of the Cyclades — remote, ancient, and largely unchanged by the tourism that has transformed much of the Aegean.
It is an island of extraordinary light and extraordinary silence. The kind of place that produces poets. The kind of place that produces people who believe that words matter.
Markos Synodinos was born here and carried it with him always.
The artwork
Anton Raphael Mengs (1728–1779) Helios as Personification of Midday Oil on canvas · Public domain Helios — the all-seeing god who crossed the sky each day and witnessed everything that happened on Earth and in the heavens.
From his chariot above the Aegean, he would have crossed the sky over Amorgos every day of Markos Synodinos’s life.