According to David Woolley of Poetry Wales: As poet, novelist and translator, Alexis Lykiard has won many admirers over the years, but the early novels apart, his work has not received the popular attention it deserves.
[4] Lykiard left Greece with his parents just after the German occupation, at the start of the four-year Greek Civil War,[4] travelling via relatives in Egypt to England.
[6] While at Cambridge University, he was editor of the university magazine Granta (originally called The Granta),[7] and on his watch contributors included Paul Overy, Rackstraw Downes, Stephen Frears, Tony Tanner, Richard Boston, John Fortune, Stephen Bann, David Holbrook, John Barrell, Richard Griffiths, David Rubadiri, Lionel Grigson and Alun Morgan, among others.
"[9] Lykiard published eight further novels – including the autobiographical Strange Alphabet (set in the Greece of 1970)[10] and The Drive North (depicting the life of a freelance writer)[11] – before abandoning fiction in favour of his first love, poetry.
Reviewing the former, Iain Sinclair characterised it as "A haunted meditation....A proper tribute to the unjustly reforgotten, as well as an heroic version of the writer's life, the slanted autobiography",[17] while Chris Petit wrote in The Guardian: The richness of Lykiard's book depends on it offering more than just a memoir....He is alert to the sharpness of Rhys's inner voice, her psychological acuity and the torpor of her stories in contrast to the exactness of her prose; he, like Rhys, is drawn to careless lives.
As well as being a meditation on the nature and business of writing, Jean Rhys Revisited is a piece of literary archaeology and a book of enthusiasms (Hamsun, Gissing, George Moore) that performs a useful act of referral.
[18]Lykiard is a respected translator from French of avant-garde classics, including the complete works of Lautréamont, and novels by Alfred Jarry and Apollinaire (complete and unexpurgated versions of the erotic novellas Les Onze Mille Verges and Les Memoires D'Un Jeune Don Juan for the first time in English), alongside Surrealist prose and poetry, Louis Aragon, Jacques Prévert and Pierre Mac Orlan (the first unexpurgated translation of Masochists in America).