Had he been alive, Seferis would himself have turned 100 this year, and a number of events have been planned to celebrate the centenary of his birth. There will be an exhibition of Seferis's photographic archive, as well as two concerts at the Megaron Mousikis .

The exhibition will take the viewer right through the poet's life, from the time of his birth in Smyrna in 1900 to the last picture taken before his death in 1971. The pictures, kindly lent by his step-daughter Mrs Anna Lontou, offer a special insight into Seferis's personal life. They will be accompanied by captions taken from his personal diaries, which were published by Maro after his death.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a catalogue of prints, and will conclude with two concerts given by the Orchestra of Colours on the 15th and 16th of December 2000. The programme will include music written especially for the occasion by the composers Mikis Theodorakis, Argyris Kounadis, Pericles Koukos, Christos Pittas, and John Tavener.

Seferis's Complete Works, in a now classic translation by  Edmund Keeley  and George Savidis , continues to win new readers in English, consistently outselling all other Greek poetry. The Nobel Prize for Literature, awarded to Seferis in 1963, brought a worldwide audience to his work and ensured his lasting fame, but his links with the literary community outside Greece were strong throughout his life.

In his professional life as a diplomat, Seferis spent long periods outside Greece, and served as Greek Ambassador to Britain from 1957-1962. In his private life, he nurtured lasting friendships with writers and intellectuals, foremost among them the writer and poet Lawrence Durrell, who became a lifelong friend.

This high regard was returned in equal measure by a large and select group of English poets and writers. Books in his private collection, now held at the Vikelaia Library in Crete, bear hand-written dedications from such legendary figures as W. H. Auden, John Betjeman, Robert Graves, Graham Greene, David Jones, Sidney Keyes, Patrick Leigh Fermor, Cecil Day Lewis, Louis Macneice and Jon Wain.

At the heart of Seferis' relationship with English poetry lies T. S. Eliot , whose work the Greek poet first encountered "on Christmas Eve of 1931 … in a bookshop on Oxford Street." This discovery would profoundly influence him throughout his work. "There are critics in our country," he wrote in 1948 in his Letter to a Foreign Friend, "who say that in the few poems I have written, they discern the influence of Eliot. This doesn't much bother me, since I do no believe that such a thing as virgin birth exists in art." 

Today, Seferis' place in the English literary pantheon is unquestioned. Alongside Montale, Pessoa or Mandelstam, Seferis is considered one of the fathers of 20th century European poetry. When, in 1988, the BBC World Service inaugurated its poetry programme with readings by famous actors, amongst poems by Robert Frost, Shakepseare, and W. H. Auden was Seferis' "The Return of the Exile" .