Dimitris Lyacos (Greek: Δημήτρης Λυάκος; born 19 October 1966) is a Greek writer. He is the author of the composite novel Until the Victim Becomes our Own and the Poena Damni trilogy. Lyacos's work has been critically defined as post-tragic, is characterised by its genre-defying form and the avant-garde combination of themes from literary tradition with elements from ritual, religion, philosophy and anthropology.
Until the Victim Becomes Our Own explores the evolution of violence in a sequence of chapters each headed by a letter of the classical Latin alphabet. The prologue evokes the attack and barbaric murder committed by a mother chimpanzee (called M2) and her son against the cub of another mother (called M1), similar to the story of Passion and Pom recounted by primatologist Jane Goodall. The first chapter is an episode reminiscent of Cain's murder of Abel from the book of Genesis.
Further episodes depict violence in its socially more advanced, institutionalized forms.
The Poena Damni trilogy interchanges prose, drama and poetry in a fractured narrative that reflects some of the principal motifs of the Western Canon. The overall text counts no more than two hundred and fifty pages, with the individual books revised and republished in different editions during a period of twenty years. The three works are arranged around a cluster of concepts including the scapegoat, the quest, the return of the dead, redemption, physical suffering, and mental illness. Lyacos's characters are always at a distance from society as such, fugitives, like the narrator of Z213: Exit, outcasts in a dystopian hinterland like in With the People from the Bridge, or marooned, like the protagonist of The First Death whose struggle for survival unfolds on a desert-like island. Poena Damni has been construed as an "allegory of unhappiness" together with works of authors such as Gabriel García Márquez and Thomas Pynchon, as well as Cormac McCarthy and has been acknowledged as an exponent of the postmodern sublime and as one of the notable anti-utopian works of the 21st century. Dimitris Lyacos is also mentioned among of the notable postmodern authors of the 21st century, as well as among Greece's likely candidates for a Nobel Prize in Literature.
Lyacos's works are published exclusively in translation. As of 2024, Until the Victim Becomes our Own and Poena Damni have not appeared in the Greek original.
Lyacos was born and raised in Athens, where he studied law. From 1988 to 1991 he lived in Venice. In 1992 he moved to London. He studied philosophy at University College London with analytical philosophers Ted Honderich and Tim Crane focusing on Epistemology and Metaphysics, Ancient Greek philosophy and Wittgenstein. In 2005 he moved to Berlin. He is currently based in Berlin and Athens.
In 1992, Lyacos set about writing a trilogy under the collective name Poena Damni, referring to the hardest trial the condemned souls in Hell have to endure, i.e. the loss of the vision of God. The trilogy has developed gradually as a work in progress in the course of thirty years. The third part (The First Death) appeared first in Greek (Ο πρώτος θάνατος) and was later translated into English, Spanish and German. The second part under the title "Nyctivoe" was initially published in 2001 in Greek and German, and came out in English in 2005. This work was substituted in 2014 by a new version under the title With the People from the Bridge. Dimitris Lyacos was Writer in Residence at the International Writing Program, University of Iowa. Lyacos appearances in literary festivals include International Literature Festival of Tbilisi in 2017, Transpoesie Festival, Brussels., International Literary Festival of Pristina, Bucharest International Poetry Festival., Ritratti di Poesia, Rome, Campania Libri, Napoli and Turin International Book Fair in 2025 and 2026.
Until autumn 2022 Lyacos's work was translated in 21 languages with the full trilogy having appeared in 7 languages. The Italian version of the trilogy was voted by Indiscreto Journal among the most important books in translation published in Italy in 2022.
Until the Victim Becomes our Own
Until the Victim Becomes our Own is a composite novel. Conceived as the book "zeroth" of the Poena Damni trilogy the book explores violence in its various manifestations, as a constitutive element in the formation of human societies and the eventual position of the individual in a world "permeated by institutionalized power". Described as prequel to Lyacos' trilogy, Until the Victim Becomes our Own outlines a portrait of Western civilization, examined and reassessed from its Judeo-Christian foundations, through industrialization and the development of advanced forms of coercion, to a harmony imposed by cybernetic control. Employing alternating narrators, the book's standalone chapters complement each other in a sequence akin to various techniques of cinematic montage. The book was published in Italian by Il Saggiatore in May 2025.
The trilogy would appear to belong to a context of tragic poetry and epic drama, albeit distinctly postmodern at the same time. It explores the deep structure of tragedy instead of its formal characteristics, having thus been called a post-tragic work. Homer, Aeschylus and Dante as well as the darker aspects of romantic poetry together with symbolism, expressionism, and an intense religious and philosophical interest permeate the work. Poena Damni has thus been related, despite its postmodern traits, more to the High Modernist tradition of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf The first of the three pieces, Z213: Exit (Z213: ΕΞΟΔΟΣ), accounts a man's escape from a guarded city and his journey through dreamlike, sometimes nightmarish, lands. In the second book, With the People from the Bridge (Με Τους Ανθρώπους Από Τη Γέφυρα) the protagonist of Z213: Exit becomes a first-degree Narrator appearing as one spectator in a makeshift play performed under the arches of a derelict train station. The third book, The First Death (Ο Πρώτος Θάνατος) opens with a marooned man on a rocky island and details his struggle for survival as well as the disintegration of his body and the unrolling of its memory banks.
The work is hard to classify since it crosses the usual boundaries of genre. Z213: Exit re-contextualizes elements from the greater Greek canon – including the escaped hero and the devote wanderer. It often takes narrative form, mixing poetry and prose. The trilogy moves into dramatic representation of character and situation in With the People from the Bridge, and subsequently to a hard lyrical kind of poetry used to depict the break-up and eventual apotheosis of the body in The First Death. The possibilities of divergence between the perceived and the objective outside world are exploited; the reader follows the irregular flow of internal monologues stemming from events in the external world but ultimately viewed as reflected onto the thinking and feeling surfaces of the protagonist's mind. On the other hand, an alien setting and the unfolding, dreamlike occurrences are presented as alternate realities, or, unveiling a hidden dimension of the world. From that perspective, the work has been interpreted as a kind of surfiction whereby the world depicted within the trilogy allows an open space for the reader to contribute his own internalized version.
Z213: Exit uses the device of the palimpsest to present a fictional tissue combining elements of both ancient and modern sources as well as the "dialogue" of its two protagonists. It is composed of a series of fragmented entries in a fictional diary recording the experiences of an unnamed protagonist during a train journey into an unknown land. The man has been released - or escaped - from some time of confinement elliptically described in his journal and reminiscent of a hospital, prison, ghetto or enclave of some sort. His subsequent wanderings among desolate landscapes on the verge of reality are set in a closely detailed, and somehow Kafkaesque, atmosphere, underlining the point that the most dreamlike occurrences are also the realest. Along the way, the protagonist delves deeper in what seems like a quasi-religious quest while, at the same time, his growing impression of being stalked introduces an element of suspense and a film noir-like quality. Thus, the text hinges on the metaphysical but is also reminiscent of an L.A. private eye in a 1940s detective novel closing upon an extraordinary discovery. Z213: Exit ends with a description of a sacrifice where the protagonist and a "hungry band feasting" roast a lamb on a spit, cutting and skinning its still bleating body and removing its entrails as if observing a sacred rite.