Greek poet who inspired Forster, Hockney and Jackie Onassis emerges from the shadows

One of the world’s most translated poets: Constantine Cavafy Photograph: Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group/Getty Images

It was the backdrop to a literary world of the lost Levant. Away from the sea, on a narrow street in the old Greek quarter of Alexandria, 10 Rue Lepsius was the home and creative sanctuary of Constantine Cavafy.

For 26 years, it was here that the poet, a bureaucrat in British-run colonial Egypt, held court, treating writers such as EM Forster to long candle-lit nights of talk over liquors and what the English novelist later recalled as “small bits of bread and cheese”.