Manolis (Emmanuel Aligizakis) is a Cretan-Canadian poet and author. He's the most prolific writer-poet of the Greek diaspora with over 70 books published in a dozen different countries and in eleven different languages. At the age of eleven, he transcribed the nearly 500-year-old romantic poem Erotokritos, now released in a limited edition of 100 numbered copies, the most expensive book of its kind to this day. 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, 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. He served in the armed forces for two years and emigrated to Vancouver in 1973, where he worked as an iron worker, train laborer, taxi driver, and stock broker, and studied English Literature at Simon Fraser University. He has written three novels and numerous collections of poetry. His articles, poems and short stories in Greek and English have appeared in various magazines and newspapers in Canada, the United States, Hungary, Slovakia, Romania, Australia, Jordan, Serbia and Greece. His poetry has been translated into Romanian, Swedish, German, Hungarian, Ukrainian, French, Portuguese, Arabic, Turkish, Serbian, Russian, Italian, Chinese, Japanese languages. He 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 book of translations entitled George Seferis-Collected Poems was shortlisted for the Greek National Literary Awards, the highest literary recognition in Greece. In September 2017 he was awarded the First Poetry Prize of the Mihai Eminescu International Poetry Festival in Craiova, Romania.