 Lyacos’s characters are always at a distance from society as such, fugitives, like the narrator of , outcasts in a dystopian hinterland like the characters 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 Garcia Marquez and Thomas Pynchon and has been acknowledged as an exponent of the postmodern sublime as well as one of the notable anti-utopian works of the 21st century.Lyacos was born and raised in Athens where he studied Law.