Anghelaki-Rooke was born in Athens, the daughter of Eleni (née Stamati) from Patras and Yannis Anghelakis from Asia Minor.
While a very young child she contracted a bacterial infection that ate affected her bones and left her with a severe limp and a stunted arm.
The themes of her poetry include the close relation between the human being and the natural world; a constant meditation on death; the experience of being a woman in a society that has traditionally circumscribed women’s activities; the indispensable contribution of sex and passionate love to the fulfilment of the self; the often tragic but at times triumphant dependency of the self on the body; and the aspiration to transcend the limitations of the body by means of the body itself.
The authors she translated from English include Saul Bellow, Joseph Brodsky, Seamus Heaney, Sylvia Plath, Dylan Thomas (Under Milk Wood), and Derek Walcott.
The Russian authors whom she translated include Leonid Andreyev, Vasily Grossman, Mikhail Lermontov, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Alexander Pushkin, Varlam Shalamov, and Andrei Voznesensky.