Spyridon Mavrommatis is a writer, painter, and conlanger from Greece. His work explores the intersections of literature, visual art, and constructed languages, often weaving text and image into unified projects. He has published a book of microfiction, poetry, fairy tales, and illustrations of his own, while his literary work has appeared in the journals Vakchikon, Simiomatario, and Culture Book. To date, he has published 28 poems and two literary essays on existential self-referentiality in the works of Cavafy and Kafka.
In painting, Mavrommatis has developed a distinctive technique he calls “Conceptual Structuralism,” primarily applied in his large-scale works. His connection to painting is deeply personal, rooted in childhood memories of his mother encouraging him to draw for her —an act that nurtured his creative path. In 2010, he received an amateur award for originality for his first large painting in this style.
Beyond visual art, his literary and artistic pursuits converge in his current ambition to write both a screenplay and a historical novel centered on the redemption of Grendel, the epic figure who inspired his exploration of myth, identity, and the creation of a conlang.
His most recent project is the Melenu language, a protophonological conlang conceived as part of a larger fictional world where sound becomes the foundation of transformation, and where myth and artistic expression intertwine.
In Search of a Hero’s Conlang: Protophonology, Part I is the first installment in Spyridon Mavrommatis’s ongoing exploration of Melenu, a constructed protolanguage conceived within a larger fictional world. This initial study focuses on phoneme classes and word patterns, tracing how sound begins to take form as the foundation of meaning, identity, and transformation. Drawing inspiration from the silence of Grendel in Beowulf, the work imagines language as both a personal and mythical act of becoming. While this paper presents only the earliest stage of the project, it marks the beginning of a broader investigation into affixation, stress, spelling conventions, and the eventual full development of Melenu as a literary and artistic conlang.
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