Category: Reading Greece

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Reading Greece
Reading Greece10 hours ago
📚📚Οn the occasion of the publication of her latest book "Synthetic Hormone" ( Εκδόσεις Καστανιώτη, 2025), lawyer, writer and a founding member of the network of women writers against gender-based violence "Her Voice", Katerina Papantoniou, spoke to Reading Greece about the way the book renegotiates the politics of embodied experience, lived gender-based violence, and trauma, and, by extension, the politics of female desire and memory, as well as, more generally, about the political potential of #gender in literature.

"Women’s writing overturns the certainties of the patriarchal world and challenges the authoritarian, anti-democratic, fascist movements that are rising globally, abolishing public goods, fundamental rights, identity and gender policies, even withdrawing “disturbing” books."

📷 © Olga Bacopoulou
Reading Greece
Reading Greece4 days ago
🎊Greece is the country of honour at the Salon du livre métropolitain, which will take place in Marseille from 17 to19 October 2025

Dedicated to celebrating #books and its many voices from across the Mediterranean, the festival’s second edition pays tribute to Greece - the founding country of the city of Marseille.

Twenty-five conferences and encounters will honour this vibrant cultural presence, bringing together nearly fifty #translators and #authors from Athens, Thessaloniki, Palermo, and beyond. Greece, in all its breadth and brilliance, will be in the spotlight: the sea, archaeology, cinema, music, song, and dance — crowned with delightful surprises, including the appearance of the great filmmaker Costa-Gavras.

The “Prix littéraire du Salon du Livre Metropolitan” was awarded to “Le dernier des ours” by Akis Papantonis (Éditions Le miel des angels) translated by Michel Volkovitch et Hélène Zervas, which was one of the two finalists together with “L'enfant qui sema la mort" by Auguste Corteau (Éditions Belfond), translated by Clara Villain.

For more info (in French)👉 https://ampmetropole.fr/missions/culture-sport-nautisme-et-grands-evenements/grands-evenements/salon-du-livre-metropolitain/

💡On this occasion, read:

🔸Akis Papantonis on the Meeting Point between Biology and Writing
https://www.greeknewsagenda.gr/reading-greece-akis-papantonis-on-the-meeting-point-between-biology-and-writing

🔸Clara Villain on Greek-French Literary Encounters
https://www.greeknewsagenda.gr/reading-greece-clara-villain-on-greek-french-literary-encounters/

🔸Auguste Corteau – When the Writer Meets the Translator
https://www.greeknewsagenda.gr/reading-greece-auguste-corteau-when-the-writer-meets-the-translator/
Reading Greece
Reading Greece5 days ago
Poem of the Day by Maria Laina

She fell out of her body
and rolled softly on top of the snow
from day to day;
perhaps a place like this exists, she thought
but old and quiet
no temptation
no love.
So she lowered her fan.

[From the bilingual edition “Hers” (World Poetry Books, 2022), translated in English by Karen Van Dyck]

Considered on the most important representatives of the so-called generation of the 1970s, Maria Laina, in “Hers”, takes inspiration from Sappho’s women-centered past and Cavafy’s homoerotic future, and presents an ascetic yet autoerotic treatise on love at odds with societal norms.

In the words of A.E. Stallings, “Hers is a book at once abstract and grounded, elusively cerebral and erotically charged, like flashes of images in splinters of a broken mirror, a minimalism that reflects and refracts. The surface simplicity of these poems arguably make them all the more difficult to render into English, but Karen Van Dyck has deftly brought them into a transparent idiom that lets their mystery shine through”.

💡To learn more about Maria Laina, read her interview to Reading Greece:

👉Maria Laina on Poetry as the Pre-Eminent Vehicle of Feeling and Emotion
https://www.greeknewsagenda.gr/reading-greece-maria-laina-on-poetry-as-the-pre-eminent-vehicle-of-feeling-and-emotion/

👉Books of the Month: ‘Rose Fear’ and ‘Hers’ by Maria Laina
https://www.greeknewsagenda.gr/books-of-the-month-rose-fear-hers-and-by-maria-laina/

🖼 Katraki Vasso (1914 - 1988), The Loneliness of Antigone, 1977, Stonecut, 106 x 76 cm// National Gallery-Alexandros Soutsos Museum