Penny Milia is a poet, writer, performer and psychotherapist from Athens. Her poetry collection After the Fire is the first poetry book in Greece featuring digital augmented reality works by visual artist Anna Meli (in Greek and English, Kappa Publishing, 2022), as well as her play Spanish Summer (Kappa Publishing, 2019), which was staged at the Beep Theatre in Athens in 2019. Her poems are also included in the collective poetry collections In Favor of Dreaming (Gavriilidis, 2012) and A Group of Poetry (Gavriilidis, 2010) and have been published in various electronic and print literary magazines (Diasticho, Dekata, Mandragoras, 24 Grammata, Poeticanet, E-poema, Thessaloniki.info, Thraca, etc.).

She has been awarded by the Panhellenic Union of Writers and the Association of European Writers-Literature for her poetry, as well as by the Greek Writers’ Guild (2017) for her play Spanish Summer. Her short story “From the Forest” was published in the collective volume of the women writers’ network “Her Voice” (Kastaniotis, 2023) and she is one of the editors of a collection of poems A hundred and twenty voices (Kastaniotis, 2025). Her play Antigone, the Strangers, and the Fire was selected and presented as a staged reading at Vault Theatre (2023), at the WE ARE ALL DIFFERENT Festival of Contemporary Greek Plays in Oxford and London and at Analogio Festival Athens. Her monodrama “The Game” was presented as a staged reading at the Ataka 2025 drama festival.

In 2022, she participated as a speaker in the conference “Performance: Theoretical Approaches and Practical Applications” at the University of Patras on “Poetry as Performance”. As a performer, she participated in the new media exhibition “Inside the Image” with the performance “Into the Words,” with “Your Things / ARE NOT / Your Life” at the 12th International Poetry Festival in Athens and Kardamyli, with the performance “A Metamorphosis?” with the Animaterra group at rooms 2020, Kappatos Gallery, and as an actress in ancient drama (Oresteia, Trojans, Thesmophoriazousae), in theatrical monologues, devised performances and musical shows.

Her video poem “The Two” (co-dir. Evangelos Vlachakis) was screened in the official program at the International Book Fair Thessaloniki 2024, at the 12th Chania Film Festival, at the International Festival of Performance art, at International Experimental Film Festival, at Nafplio Bridges Festival, and at Agrinio film festival. She also organizes workshops on poetry.

Your collection After the Fire was the first poetry book in Greece to include digital augmented-reality pieces. What inspired you to combine poetry with technology, and what do you think such hybrid forms bring to the poetic experience?

I love ancient drama, dramatic poetry, and anonymous traditional songs, and I am just as deeply drawn to experimentation, innovation, and the element of surprise. I have always been attracted by those points where people, things, arts, and techniques meet, intersect, sometimes collide, or come together to form something new, something different. When I asked the artist and new-media researcher Anna Melí, who was just completing her doctoral thesis on writing, image, and the evolution of the substrate, to design the cover of the collection, she had already fallen in love with the poems and suggested that we experiment with something far more expansive: an illustration created through digital media.

We began an exhilarating dialogue, each of us setting out from her own art, and what emerged was a biotope, a habitat, an environment in which the poems could come alive and dwell. It does not merely frame meanings and words; it transforms them into beings that breathe, have pulse and voice, break the boundaries of convention, and escape the page. Within the six images that open and close the three parts of the collection, together with the cover also created by Anna, the “hidden” artworks are embedded like a parallel universe: works invisible to the naked eye, revealed only when the reader–viewer looks through a smartphone or tablet, after, of course, downloading the corresponding application from my website, pennymiliawriting.

The three-dimensional works, emerging from the two-dimensional logic of a book page or a photograph, extend into the space outside and around the book: like key annotations, like drawings cut from the same paper, like living word–image–symbols that acquire body and movement before our eyes, like dreams. We used both visual, cinematic elements and writing itself, treating each page as an autonomous scene, with great care to “visual” cinematic rhythm as well as to “visual” sound. The reader–viewer’s poetic experience is enriched and deepened because it is lived as a kind of digital mise-en-scène, a staging of linear and verbal forms that “perform a play” on the pages of the book’s form. A kind of pocket-scale direction, connected in a way to the idea of theatre and performance.

Hybrid forms coalesce into a new poetic body, multiform and alive; an artwork that mediates and offers itself as both field and object of art to the reader–viewer. Α space for navigation, for active interaction that multiplies the poetic body. In this way, we move together with a new “language,” with new media, into new fields.

In After the Fire, there’s a palpable sense of aftermath, of what remains once something has burned, literally or metaphorically. What thematic threads did you find yourself returning to as you wrote this collection? Are fire, loss, and transformation part of a larger poetic inquiry in your work?

My relationship with writing and poetry is continuous. I cannot separate it from life and experience. From an early age till today, I write almost daily, keeping notes, verses, impressions, comments, moments, sensations for future poems and projects. As a member of “Α Group of Poetry”, I already had poems published in two collective volumes published by Gavriilidis, some of which were awarded by the Panhellenic Union of Writers and the Union of Writers-Novelists of Europe. Yet I hesitated to publish a personal collection. Another book? Another poem? What could I possibly say? So many have said it already in Greek; we even have Nobel laureates. Moreover, Adorno’s claim, that “to write even one poem after Auschwitz is barbaric”, haunted me. “In the end, I wrote too”, as I say in the poem “Breaking News” from the collection; I managed it somehow (as Adorno, who later revised his statement) by writing the poem “To Adorno”, since, as Neruda says, “poems belong to those who need them”. If that is so, I thought, do we even have the right to remain silent?

The motto of the collection – “Books do not contain life, but its ashes,” as Marguerite Yourcenar writes in Alexis – set the tone and provided the foundation for the theme of After the Fire. The roughly forty poems that ultimately made it into the book were written over the past ten years and more, so choosing which to include and seeing what remained from such a period was, in itself, a personal feat – a kind of personal retrospective. Those that were rejected in the process, the “exiled” poems, are far more numerous, which makes the title After the Fire true not only thematically but also procedurally. After the Fire is what has passed “through fire and water,” what has survived and endured this refining – through time, through losses, through experiences – relative to words, poetry, and life itself. Things must be done while on fire; that is what produces poetic events. Reflection on them, around them, through them, occurs simultaneously. Their imprint – the words, the feelings, the sensations – is what remains.

Poetry is the most complex and the most natural thing. “For a single word, you melt thousands of tons of linguistic ore”, said Mayakovsky, and “Mother, your son is exquisitely ill. Mother! He suffers from a heart of fire”*. Fire carries formidable connotations, and for this particular book, Promethean fire, in a sense, symbolizes new knowledge, new media, the tool of augmented reality. Fire, beyond its destructive power, as a kind of sacred flame, also purifies, sanctifies, regenerates. It is one of the primordial elements of the world, symbolizing, together with air, the spirit for the Stoic philosophers. The one who brings fire, the sacred light, the fallen angel, but also the sun god, is a fiery mass. The maintenance of fire, of the hearth, is among the first acts of civilization; they say it is even responsible for language itself, since having tamed and cooked our food, more time remained for conversation and light for night vigils. Fire embodies speed, urgency, but also the sacred, the ceremonial, and, when under our control, power. After the fire, after civilization—what is the reckoning of our culture? This phrase encompasses all these themes, which the collection touches upon: it is not monothematic, neither in form nor in content. What endures? From the fire? What remains? Who remains? All these questions arise. The ancient sphinxes still deliver oracles through spirals that move slowly and ritually. Cycladic figurines, the most mysterious artifacts, hold a Promethean torch. Are they avengers? Are they initiates? Are they saviors? The word voice is whole, and around it, the word bo-di-es, dismembered, inhabits a parallel, poetic augmented reality.

(*From A Talk with a Tax Collector, and A Cloud in Trousers respectively)

Your language often feels both intimate and incantatory—at once grounded in emotion and reaching for something beyond it. How do you approach the crafting of poetic language? Do you see language as a tool, a material, or almost as a character in itself?

You have read my relationship with language very accurately. “Poetry is the refuge we envy”, the place we struggle to enter and the place we envy in others; those who enter, those
“outcast”. It is the wild bull we try to tame in a sacred bull-leaping ritual. We are born into language. It is “our oldest mother”, our all-golden goddess. Language has always been there: my imaginary friend, the horse that ran through my imagination, the magic key to a world that consoles and enlivens, the spell. The lover we tremble before. Our childhood companion. “The antidote”, as I call it in the poem that bears the same title. I cannot describe it otherwise. It is the holy spirit. “O golden eyelid of the day,” says Sophocles. I enjoy playing with the level of intimacy. A poem may emerge as a declarative oracle, a lyrical sonnet, an associative poem, or a poem in the form of a dialogue.

Language and poetry, and my relationship with them, are the subject of many of my poems. I am thrilled by this mixture, as in the book, of the primordial and the familiar alongside the contemporary and the modern: in form, content, theme, medium, and more. Language is a central theme of the book. “Everyone asks him. He knows nothing. Why should he speak of these things?” the poet says in the poem “The Dream”. How do we speak, and thus how do we write, after all this? After the Fire? After language? Postmodern? Poe did not write The Raven, he did not “make” the raven when asked; he was the raven.

We live within language; we are language. It intoxicates us, as wine does others. I have always had an aversion to wooden language, dead language that has no sap, that merely reflects its capacity to produce and consume grammar and syntax, rather than poetry. A message, an idea, a distillation of wisdom, or an academic philology or elegance. These are for a brilliant mind constructing logical edifices and arguments: write an article, an essay, conduct research, radiate intellect. For me, language that does not burn or spark from friction is a twisted language, a crippled, passive language; like the feet of the lotus, which for centuries forced the toes of young Chinese girls to remain small, never to run freely. Of course, this is also a matter of taste, and of how each poet experiences it.

Many of your works include performative or multimedia dimension (performances, video-poems). What does performance add to the written word for you, especially in terms of presence, embodiment, or space?

In this, I am perhaps a child of my time. To me, these things are interconnected, inseparable. Like the island houses, where one balcony is the ceiling of the house below. Facets, reflections, mirrors, desires, and their material representations – technology, media, tools – evolve, and people will always make art with new instruments, with ever-renewing forms and techniques. Written language and poetry confined exclusively to paper, have enjoyed far fewer years of dominance, historically speaking. Poetry, theatre, anything connected to language, has always been performative, related to other functions, and never just an art form. If the starting point of poetry is speech, the magical, healing word of the shaman, the ambiguous oracles, the hieroglyphs long before that, the songs repeated by every mother or carer to soothe and comfort the child, then poetry is inherently presence, embodiment, enactment, action. Take epitaphs, for example – they carry the body, in place of the missing body, in the presence of the face.

Performance and video poetry are not new phenomena. To consider poetry solely as words on a page, unspoken, unheard, unuttered, is, in historical terms, a novelty. In this sense, they reconnect us to the primordial root of poetry, and that is why they can be so powerful, especially when combined with contemporary technology and new media. Performance is in our nature, in our origin. Western humans rediscover it, or unearth it, from the places where it has been confined and exiled: religion, music, theatre, as well as gender stereotypes, roles within the family or couple, rhetoric, and so on. Performance brings the dynamism of enactment, theatricality, and active participation to the forefront: embodiment, presence, the creator on stage. For example, the augmented works in After the Fire, which the reader–viewer can experience in three dimensions, are essentially small-scale stagings that presuppose the viewer’s active participation – as the operator of the mobile camera used to read or watch them. Similarly, the video poem The Two from the collection is created with a cinematic logic, which is why I believe it succeeds. Vlahakis does not depict the poem literally. Instead, he constructs a parallel story in dialogue with the poem; one that the poem itself might have produced under a different logic, in a far more unexpected way.

The performances in which I participate presuppose a technique and presentation training that I have acquired from actors training, and so it feels entirely natural to me. Some might find this natural ease, this seamless linking of the arts, strange, but for me, the relationship and the proportion are utterly real. For centuries, the arts were a bodily enactment, with the entire community as one: no separation between audience, spectators, readers, and performers; everyone and everything were co-performers. Then came specialization, the split from the sciences, deepening, categorization, demystification, and disenchantment. The sun is not a god. God is dead. Far from caring about our performances, our prayers, and our offerings. Having been fragmented down to molecules and atoms, having mastered nuclear energy and walked on the moon, now Art gathers itself again and examines its joints: interdisciplinary and cross-artistic fields open before us and reunite us. Performance, enactment, events, interaction, and the audience once more as “content creator”, equipped with astonishingly godlike tools such as AI, the new Talos. For me, in art, the continuum is not fixed; it flows and transforms.

Poet, playwright, performer, psychotherapist. How do these roles feed into one another in your creative work?

At first glance, everything seems to begin with the letter P, just like my name. I’m joking, of course; that only works in English. Still, it may be telling of my interests, where the dominant connecting thread appears to be my relationship with Language. In Greece, it is difficult to make a living from art, especially from poetry or theatre, and so I earn my livelihood from something I love just as much as poetry. Psychotherapy has been called the talking cure by one of Freud’s patients, the famous Anna O., and they held therapeutic sessions in the forests of Vienna, much as in Aristotle’s peripatetic philosophical school. I also have two years of training in Translation, a strong command of English and a good knowledge of Italian. Since a young age, I have sung and played the guitar.

Humanities, and their conjunction with the arts, I suppose, call for a mind preoccupied with, and captivated by, the human being: by faces, senses, their modes of expression, their relationships and behaviors, as close as possible to their authentic form, yet also to their play with form and with the joy it brings, its capacity for delight. Art is the play, the recreation, and the joy of adults. In psychotherapy today, and in neurobiology as well, we speak of the psychosomatic: the unified, indivisible self, the whole, the person. That old division no longer holds – between soul and feelings, mind and thoughts, body and acts or actions. Lacan, opaque to most of my fellow students, was my favorite, precisely because he spoke so much about language. Karouzos wrote that “the poet seeks to dam the sources of madness,” and perhaps he is speaking of that unimpeded access artists have to the unconscious, that passport to what lies within us.

The word art is etymologically kin to the act of bringing forth – to beget, to give birth, to create. It’s within our fissures, our invisible seams, in wounds and in their healing, that ruptures, earthquakes, take place. It is there that the greatest energy is released; the rift-born force that gives rise to new ground, new foundations, new balances, harmonies, and positions.

How does Greek art converse with world artistic trends? Where do you see the intersection between the global and the local in your work?

Greece today produces art against the odds. In defiance of the times, what is being written and materialized by Greek poets, writers, playwrights, and performers is in no way inferior to the celebrated names we import at great cost as cultural totems from abroad. What is lacking are infrastructures, institutions, cultural literacy, and above all funding, while there exists an immense reservoir of cultural capital for the country to invest in. With the cultural heritage we possess, I do not know why we are not among the leading forces. Is it impoverishment and the economic crisis, coupled with the hemorrhaging of human artistic potential abroad? The difficult fate of small languages, despite two Nobel Prizes in poetry? Language in particular – the environment, the very material of poetry – is in decline. Greek is an ancestral language, enslaved, neutralized. It is undergoing the same cultural crisis that is, of course, global. All-powerful American culture, cultural colonization, is worldwide. People resist, poets resist, each one struggling to hold their ground, as best they can.

One of my favorite poetry books, to which I often return, is Indian Songs, translated, of course, in 1988. Today, the title is “wrong”. Rightly and justly so; it would now be called Indigenous Peoples’ Songs, or something of the kind. In much the same way, I believe our poems, those written in Greek, will be read in the future; if they are read at all. If they survive. On the other hand, our shared language, English, has brought us together, connected us as never before. We enjoy art and workshops from all cultures, all over the world. In theory, we can reach an audience everywhere. And yet, even as we consume more art than ever, we grow increasingly hungry. Language is the most living, the most flexible thing in the world, and while arts may change with the rise and fall of civilizations, the need for art does not change. It fulfills fundamental, irreplaceable human functions.

In our time, a vast transition is underway, comparable in scale to the Industrial Revolution, affecting all fields: the arts, the sciences, and human civilization as a whole, driven by AI. It will bring correspondingly profound structural changes. Experiences, relationships, proportions, and materials are all shifting. These are precisely the concerns that occupy me, and the same goes for my fellow artists around the world; they will always find their place in my work and in my writing.

*Interview by Athina Rossoglou

The post Reading Greece: Penny Milia – “Poetry is inherently presence, embodiment, enactment, action” appeared first on Greek News Agenda.

Dimitris Eleas studied in London and is a writer, researcher, and political activist based in New York City. His work spans a wide range of texts, articles, essays, and books. In recent years, his writings have explored themes such as the Holocaust, Hellenism, contemporary America, the Left, Greek-Turkish relations, Castoriadian thought, and “the restaurant as a cultural space.” Between 2010 and 2012, and again between 2023 and 2025, Dimitris Eleas lived in major European cities, undertaking research –in honor of the Jewish people– on centuries of antisemitism, with particular attention to WWII and the Holocaust.) He is currently developing his new work — the novel/‘essay’in English, “The Black Birds of Warsaw” (a project in progress for fifteen continuous years).

The period 1585 - 1592 in Shakespeare’s life is often called his “lost years”. What drew you to write a novel about this enigmatic period, and how much is historical reconstruction vs. imagination in your narrative?

Ah, the “lost years”! A biographer’s nightmare, a novelist’s paradise. I was drawn to that glorious black hole in Shakespeare’s life the way cats are drawn to boxes – mysteriously and with full commitment. As for historical reconstruction vs. imagination? Let’s just say history provided ‘the flour and the eggs’, and my imagination baked the whole cake… with extra frosting. After all, if Shakespeare could invent words, surely, I can invent what he did on Mondays in 1588. To be a writer is ‘a glory’ and ‘a curse’…

You use Shakespeare’s life not simply as a biographical subject but as a way to explore contemporary issues. Could you describe how Shakespeare’s early years serve as a lens for them?

Absolutely… Shakespeare’s “lost years” let me weave timeless questions into a timely tale. I used his early silence as a mirror for today’s noise – inequality, identity, social media, power plays that would make even Hamlet say, “Seriously?” Through will, I explored our own messy situation. And let’s be honest: if young Shakespeare lived today, he’d be part poet, part protester, probably tweeting sonnets from a café while dodging rent, writing plays on his smartphone, and ghostwrite for other writers. And perhaps here, I could add that when I was younger myself, ‘I wagged my finger’ at Noam Chomsky, I met Jacques Derrida, and I even handed a letter to Jürgen Habermas. Why on earth did I do all that? Perhaps because I always had a sense that the early years in a person’s life will show them the path they’ll walk later on.

When writing historical or semi‑historical fiction, how do you view the role of the novelist: to imagine, to interpret, to question? What responsibilities come with fictionalizing periods about which we have only partial knowledge?

Ah, the novelist’s sacred duty: to imagine boldly… but not commit historical heresy (too often). I see myself as part detective, ‘part time-traveler’, part Shakespeare’s nosy neighbor. When facts fade, imagination steps in respectfully, like a guest at a royal banquet. The real responsibility? To ‘tell a lie’ that reveals a deeper truth. And to avoid putting Shakespeare in skinny jeans or a podcast – tempting, yes, but let’s not scare the Shakespearean scholars too much.

You have lived and worked in various cities - London, Warsaw, Cyprus, New York - and write in both Greek and English. How has that geographic and linguistic mobility shaped your sensibility as a writer?

Living in London ‘taught me’ how to be witty (not easy), Warsaw gave me resilience, Cyprus offered sunlight (and ‘ancient Greek imaginary’), and New York? Strong coffee, endless stories per square inch, and yet, some people in New York are stingy. Writing in both Greek and English is like having two passports to imagination, sometimes they argue at customs, but they always let the words through. Hmm. This cross-cultural chaos sharpened my empathy, expanded my humor, and gave my writing ‘the knowledge of everywhere’. Honestly, I think in aphorisms now. And if Shakespeare had traveled this much, he’d probably have written Othello as a romantic comedy on a ferry.

Your writings includes novels, essays, political activism, and commentary. How do these different modes interact in your work? Do you see them as distinct or part of a single project?

To me, it’s all ‘one chaotic’, beautiful project: telling the truth, or at least poking it with a sharp stick. Novels ‘let me dream’, essays ‘make me think’, activism ‘makes me yell’ (politely), and commentary ‘helps me connect’ the dots, often with a mischievous wink. They argue sometimes –the novelist wants metaphors; the activist wants a megaphone– but they share a messy desk in my brain. Honestly, it’s less of a writing process, more of a group revolutionary session… with ideas. (Regarding my activism, though, it might be worth mentioning here that some of my letters on various important issues have been published by prestigious newspapers such as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post.) I also wear a wig when I work on a novel… No, I don’t, but I should. Haha! Perhaps, in the end, behind everything lies what I would call “the three H’s: Humor, humility, humanity.” One day we leave…

As a political activist and writer, how do you see literature contributing to social or political change? Do you aim for your novels to provoke, to comfort, to educate, or some combination?

Literature can’t start a revolution alone, but it can whisper dangerously in the ear of one. I discuss many issues with some friends, such as the French-American activist David Andersson, the Kurdish-American author Kamuran Cakir, and Christos Morogiannis. And also, I don’t write to preach; I write to poke, to stir, to light small fires in quiet minds. If a novel can make you laugh, think, and maybe question why your visit at the dentist’s is higher than your rent, then I’ve done my job. I aim to provoke andcomfort, like a warm hug that delivers a reality check. And please… “buy ‘the damn book’, because I don’t want Shakespeare to lose his respect for Dimitris ELEAS.” Haha! Or buy a mirror, if you want – at the very least buy something…

As a small addendum here at the end, I want to thank, from the depths of my heart, Athina Rossoglou and Reading Greece website (of the Hellenic Ministry of Foreign Affairs). I am truly grateful and hope I proved worthy of your time. Greece must be protected by all Greeks and all Philhellenes as the apple of our eye. And every Greek abroad must be a quiet ambassador of this sacred and noble land... the land of my mother, my father, and all the ancestors, stretching from Homer’s time to our own.

*Ιnterview by Athina Rossoglou

The post Reading Greece: Dimitris Eleas – “I write to poke, to stir, to light small fires in quiet minds” appeared first on Greek News Agenda.

Dimitra Louka was born in Preveza. She is a philologist. She lives and works in Athens. She has published the short story collections Knot by Knot (Kichli, 2019), Mouta and Other Stories (Kichli, 2021), and Persephone in the Wolf’s Mouth (Kichli, 2024). For Knot by Knot she was awarded the New Prose Writer Award of the online magazine O Anagnostis. The collection was also shortlisted for the Menis Koumandareas Award of the Hellenic Authors’ Society, while Mouta and Other Stories and Persephone in the Wolf’s Mouth were shortlisted for the Short Story Award of O Anagnostis magazine. Her short stories have been included in collective volumes and published in print and online literary magazines. They have been translated into French and Hebrew.

Persephone in Worf’s Mouth draws from myth while placing its heroine in a contemporary emotional landscape. What sparked the initial idea for this story and its mythological threads? Were there specific challenges in reimagining a well-known mythic figure in a contemporary or personal setting?

I grew up in the wider Acheron area, swimming as a child and playing at its estuary. I think I always felt the historical and mythological weight that this place carries, so the appropriation and exploration of the myth of Persephone came as a natural consequence. Since childhood, I also enjoyed seeing reality transformed, and I read mythical narratives and folk tales with great passion. So, while in my two previous books, the short-story collections Knot by Knot and Mouta and Other Stories, I transformed the external world, in Persephone in the Wolf’s Mouth I reshaped the ancient Greek myth of Demeter and Persephone.

This myth also became a means through which I could speak about the mother-daughter relationship, a bond that has preoccupied me for years; first as a daughter, and later as a mother. It was also a way to explore the violent imposition of the masculine upon the feminine, a thematic thread that runs through my previous books as well. Naturally, it is not easy to invent thematic or ideological reversals of a myth, no matter how welcoming it may be to new interpretations and approaches. Yet I treated this writing adventure like a puzzle; and whenever its pieces finally slid into place, I felt an immense sense of satisfaction.

Myth, symbolism, memory, identity and psychological introspection often appear in your stories. What draws you to these recurring themes?

Indeed, many of my stories rest upon “mythic grounds”, which I attempt to widen by reinterpreting them. Symbols operate in much the same way throughout my work. The symbolic polysemy, for instance, of the title Persephone in Wolf’s Mouth embraces nearly all the thematic threads that run through the collection. “Persephone” is a young girl setting out on a new life, far from the shelter of her mother’s protection, exposed to all the dangers such a departure entails. And “wolf’s mouth” points symbolically to the narcissistic mother who devours her daughter, to the violent male who seizes her from her paternal home, to the deathliness that can inhabit a marriage, and even to that threshold between life and death where many of my heroines find themselves suspended.

Myths and symbols are primal forms from which endless stories can be born; they speak to us in subtle, subterranean ways, linking the individual to the collective fate, the present to its ancestral past. I feel the same is true of memory and identity: when we write “stories,” we are, in truth, trying to articulate who we are, what we carry with us, and what we long to forget. I return to these realms again and again because they offer me a way to better understand myself and the world. As for psychological introspection, it lies at the very heart of literary writing, which must illuminate the contradictions, the shadows, the hidden passions that pulse beneath every human experience.

Your work focuses on the mother–daughter relationship, which unfolds within the constraints of patriarchy. How do you navigate the feminist dimension in your work?

In many of the stories in my collection, mothers and daughters suffer under male violence that seeks to control and imprison women. Indeed, my stories unfold in environments structured by patriarchal norms. Since they operate within a sphere where gender roles have historically crystallized, they can also be read through a feminist lens. My heroines emerge as symbolic female figures, confronting the masculine within the framework of a necessary coexistence. Some lose the battle, provoking feelings of anger and indignation at the injustice inflicted upon women; others stand tall, prevailing in their struggle. In the former, the roles, images, and destinies that patriarchy imposes on women are affirmed, emphasizing the need for female self-awareness. In the latter, the mythic archetype of Persephone is reimagined – a woman whose fate was once determined by men – thereby overturning the ancient Greek myth.

I should, however, emphasize that my writing does not stem from any theoretical starting point. What primarily concerns me is human experience: the tensions, the silences, the unspoken expectations that shape this complex relationship, which I approach as profoundly human and existential; always, of course, within the historical framework that inevitably shapes it. In other words, a feminist reading does not exhaust the work. It is one possible lens through which it can be understood, but not the only path.

Many of your protagonists are women, often negotiating gender, power, tradition. How do you see your work contributing to contemporary debates about gender and voice in Greek literature?

As aforementioned, my short stories do not originate from a theoretical stance on gender, but from the lived experience of my heroines, who confront traditional forms of authority and predetermined social roles. To the extent that my work engages with contemporary discussions about the female voice, it certainly exhibits ideological and aesthetic traits recognizable as feminine, but it does so through a quiet, understated approach, focused on the fragility of the mother–daughter relationship and the individual journey of the woman, beyond established feminist models.

How do you shape the language of your prose - its rhythm, its density, its emotional texture - and what role does linguistic experimentation play in your writing process?

The language of my prose is shaped by a conscious tendency toward simplicity and density: adjectives are limited, while verbs and nouns dominate, and, syntactically, simple sequences of main clauses are generally preferred. The short story, as a genre, demands precision and economy of expression, so I strive to ensure that every word carries the weight it deserves. The rhythm of my texts is internal; it often emerges from the silence between sentences. To achieve this, I read each paragraph aloud, often multiple times. As for linguistic experimentation, it is not an end in itself. Small shifts in syntax or experiments with narrative perspective are sometimes used as tools to convey subtle emotional nuances. My aim is not to dazzle with language, but to create a linguistic form that suits each story.

Looking back at your earlier collections, Knot by Knot (2019) and Mouta and Other Stories (2021), do you see a through‐line or a thematic evolution that leads into Persephone in Wolf’s Mouth?

Although there is certainly a common thematic thread running through all three of my short story collections – focusing on women’s experiences in patriarchal societies – the first two, Knot by Knot and Mouta and Other Stories, arose from a deep need to return to my ancestral past, to listen to the narratives of my parents and grandparents, and perhaps to settle certain internal matters or uncover hidden secrets I had long been unaware of.

While my first two books were written by observing and attentively listening to the stories of the people from my native land, Persephone in Wolf’s Mouth emerged from a systematic reading of other literary texts and folk tales from the global tradition. In the stories of this latest collection, I draw my material from a variety of mythological parallels, and I believe that it is precisely this subversive engagement with myth, fairy tale, and countless other literary texts that sets this collection apart from the earlier ones.

*Ιnterview by Athina Rossoglou

The post Reading Greece: Dimitra Louka on Re-imagining Ancient Myths in Contemporary Settings appeared first on Greek News Agenda.

Natassa Sideri was born in Athens in 1981. She is a playwright, writer and translator. Her plays and short stories have been published and produced internationally, winning multiple distinctions and awards. As a translator, she has translated, edited or adapted for the theatre texts by Κeiran Goddard, Henri Lefebvre, Miranda July, Caroline de Mulder, Volker Ludwig, Matei Visniec, Isabella Hamad, Ferdia Lennon, etc.

Your latest writing venture Το μόνο ζώο [The Only Animal] was recently published by Gennitria. Tell us a few things about the book.

The Only Animal is a collection of short stories which explores a key formula in Western culture: “Man is the only animal that…” As man is the only animal that has this eternal need to define himself through what he considers his opposite, the idea behind this book is to test the ground on which these definitions of the animal have been proposed. Each short story in the collection begins with an epigraph. These are various iterations of the aforementioned phrase, coined by thinkers as varied as Aristotle, Friedrich Dürrenmatt, and George Orwell, among others. I find this paradoxical formula fascinating. Why do we humans have this need to both declare that we are animals and, by the same token, insist on the fact that we are not really the same as animals, as we are the only ones to possess X, a certain shifting quality that changes throughout the centuries?

The book, of course, is a literary project and not a philosophical treatise, so it is the stories that give the answers, or rather ask the questions by placing their characters in situations where the seams holding together these temporary constructions become apparent. These stories portray women and men – more women but also some men – who are forced to look at themselves in mirrors held up by animals, gods, or machines, whether real or imagined. For example, a cow being milked in a farm during a group visit urges a childless theatre director to challenge her previous certainties, an egg donor in a waiting room contemplates the future of humanity, a civil engineer decides to reintroduce wolves in his father’s village to help men restore the masculine role model they are gravely missing – plus other episodes from the life and works of the only animal that blushes, the only animal that keeps a secret, the only animal that prays before committing murder, the only animal that…

The short stories navigate the fragile threshold between human and animal, moving between stark realism and allegorical resonance. Which were the main themes you set out to explore in the book?

To tell you the truth, it wasn’t so much in terms of themes that I approached the subject. I thought a lot about dichotomies. The working title of the book was “Man and”. And even though this title was eventually dropped, traces of it can still be discerned in the structure of the collection. There are stories dealing with the relation between man and animal, four of them in total, but also stories treating man’s relation to God and the machine. “Infinite monkeys”, for instance, started out as a mock retake of a Cartesian meditation, and ended up as a stream of consciousness of a woman participating in an increasingly industrialized reproductive process, which nonetheless doesn’t stop her from celebrating the fact that she has the choice to participate in this process of her own free will. “To Keros”, also, the concluding story of the collection, assumes the guise of a biblical narration to offer a speculative explanation of the fascinating enigma of Keros – a tiny island on the Cyclades where a vast number of statuettes, presumably used in worship, have been unearthed. The findings, however, date back to the Early Bronze Age, so can we even be sure what religion meant to these people, if they even had any gods at all and what role, what function they assigned to them? That’s the question the story sets out to explore, with Mark Twain’s quip “Man is the Religious Animal. He is the only Religious Animal. He is the only animal that has the True Religion—several of them” serving as the epigraph.

Τhe book constitutes a literary incision at the point where biology, ethics, and society collide. Do you see writing as inherently political? Or do you think literature is more powerful when it works subtly, through suggestion rather than statement?

I believe literature is at its most political precisely when it works through suggestion. Literature, or at least what I consider good literature, is not a pedestal to preach from, not a space to ruminate preformed opinions but rather a place of discovery where both the writer and the reader can find themselves shifting sides before passing (or permanently refraining from passing) judgement. None of this is new, Aristotle already said as much in his Poetics. In the agon the two sides must carry roughly the same weight or else the struggle will not be convincing, the reader/spectator will not be moved, will not be frightened and in the end there will be a yawn instead of catharsis.

Writers, of course, are at the same time citizens, often engaged ones publicly expressing political views and taking action. But it is not this function that readers are looking to engage with when they open the book. There are many professionals whose job is it to offer statement and opinion, but this is not the case with writers. Literature offers story, plot even in the absence of plot and this complex game of identification that bears a very peculiar relationship to truth and statement. This is what we ask of writers, not to get the facts straight but to give us an untrue story that, through its untruth, can reveal to us something about our experience that we probably knew already but hadn’t managed to isolate in the everyday flow of things.

Language seems central to your style, with your prose being interspersed with poetic elements. What role does language play in your writings?

You know, although I do understand where you’re coming from, the funny thing is I don’t really think of myself as a writer that cares too much about language. Yes, things like rhythm, economy, and convincing character voice (especially in theatre) are important to me, and I do work obsessively until I get them right, but once everything is said and done I like to think that the story and the language that is used to tell it are part of the same process of deciphering. It’s like a scale, really, if the thing leans too much on the language side the prose will sound pompous and laboured, the reader will start hearing the author’s voice rather than the character’s; whereas if you don’t work on language at least enough to develop a frame for your story and your character to live in, then the reader will most likely fail to read the story as literature, and will instead approach it as a news item or some kind of disguised memoir, and will be searching to find the shadow of real people behind the silhouette of the character.

But when literature does things right, we don’t find ourselves wondering if it’s language, the character or the story that came first. Take, for example, Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury. Could we ever imagine having access to Benjy’s story independently from his narrative voice? And how about Malone or practically every character from a Kraznahorkai novel? Obviously, Faulkner, Beckett and Kraznahorkai are great stylists that did marvellous things through, with and to language, but from a reader’s perspective, I vividly remember both admiring their prose when I first opened their books and quickly forgetting my admiration the more I got into the story – as if this was the only possible way to have this story told by that person, the most natural thing in the world.

Where does literature meet the theatre in your work? Does the dramaturgical form—with its emphasis on voice, presence, and immediacy—leave traces in your prose? Or do you find that fiction allows for a different kind of interiority, a quieter unfolding of truth?

I’d say the latter. When I see something on the street that is story material, it’s usually very clear to me what I should do with it. When I write theatre, the process starts and normally also ends with a question, specifically a question I don’t have an answer to, whether on or off stage. This question is then first delivered to the polyphony of the theatre, then to the actors and the director, and finally handed over to the public as a take-home gift. This is how theatre has worked since antiquity: as a place for asking difficult questions that could be neither raised nor answered anywhere else in the polis without creating havoc. Short stories, on the other hand, at least for me, provide this space of interiority that allows the reader to follow the character’s journey in a more intimate setting than the theatre, where the world that the work creates is invited to enter the room through the reader’s filtering of it rather than the actors’ boisterous voices and ever-present bodies. So yes, it’s a quieter unfolding of truth, I really like how you put it. Rules, of course, are made to be broken, with the last story in the book being one such example.

*Interview by Athina Rossoglou

The post Reading Greece: Natassa Sideri on the Meeting Point Between Literature and Theatre appeared first on Greek News Agenda.

Valia Tsirigoti was born ten days before Chernobyl, on the cat-island of Saint Helena, but she grew up in Athens. She studied Social and Human Sciences, which she continues to pursue and loves, specializing in Psychotherapy, as well as in Art and Culture. She has written for poetry magazines, documentaries, a little for the theater (though she hopes to do more in the future), for collective volumes, on the internet, and on napkins. She misses Helsinki a lot, as well as some people who died but fortunately continue to live. Atlas of Healing is her first book.

Atlas of Healing, recently published by Tri.ena Politismou, has been described as a hybrid chronicle. Tell us a few things about the book.

Atlas of Healing is a collection of small texts – fragments, almost – that eventually form a vast map. It is a chronicle, for each time it is everyday life that provides the spark. A daily life that passes through like a procession, striving to find others. It is hybrid, because it weaves together a kind of heavy realism with another realm. Some would call that realm magical, others fantastical; I call it metamorphosis. The idea of metamorphosis haunts me in many ways. It is also hybrid because it weds different languages, at times approaching the tone of an essay, at others seeking to converse with poetry; sometimes speaking in a voice I think wholly childlike, and sometimes in one entirely aged. The notion of hybridity preoccupies me both in life and in art. I am fascinated by how genetically disparate materials can ultimately form a whole.

The title – Atlas - evokes a kind of mapping, a certain orientation. What kinds of landscapes – emotional, collective, symbolic – are you mapping in the book?

When the idea of mapping first began to take shape within me, that is of using the texts as places, or landscapes, as you might say, I think it had to do with a new universe I longed to create. It was as if, in some way, each text possessed a place of origin. And that place marked the depths from which each story was born. That is why the first text of the book is Big Bang – the explosion that gives birth to a new universe. The first section is The Aleph Gate, inspired by Borges, and it gathers together texts connected by an invisible axis that revolves around chance. A subversive kind of chance, which ultimately becomes the very force that propels you forward; the gate through which you enter this world.

All the landscapes – valleys, mountains, hills, rivers – that have found their own names, I would say they seek to chart a collective emotion, or perhaps to become a place truly lived in. The Mountain “I Miss You Deeply, Down to the Bone” maps the corporeality of absence; The Park of Sorrow’s Reversal becomes the place where grief is undone; while The Valley of the Love That Never Arrived hums softly for all that we never managed to reach. My connection with theatre often leads me toward this strange coexistence of spatialities: imagined locations and paths that give body to words. Perhaps it also recalls the way I survived what we all call childhood; through a game where naming something means it exists, and that existence becomes a kind of solace. Whatever exists, keeps you company.

The book moves through intimate, everyday spaces—a bathroom, a kitchen, a prison cell—elevating them into places of memory and healing. How did you choose these settings, and what role do they play in your narrative?

I don’t know if I would have thought of it, had you not asked. The everyday spaces that slip between my emotional landscapes emerged organically. They were like pauses along an intensely charged journey; the chair you seek for a moment, so that the mythical doesn’t sweep you away entirely. I write, in a way, with my body, and I saw myself walking, and somewhere ahead, humanity would appear, like a light on a vast highway, the kind of light that tells you: there is home, there are people there. They are all familiar, habitable spaces. I would say easily habitable, in the sense of daily use, and at the same time unbearably habitable, bearing the weight of what they hold. A kitchen, a bathroom, a waiting room, a cell; life unfolding in endless parallel versions.

At the same time, I think these places also mark, quite strongly, the urban – the solitude of the city. It is, without doubt, a book that carries within it my own city, Athens. Athens is always there, both my refuge and my torment. I love the city deeply, even as I recognize the toxic fragments of our relationship. Within these everyday spaces, I felt the need to create rituals; like frames within a paradoxical pilgrimage.

You describe your work as part of a “literature of care”. What does care mean to you—not just as a theme, but as an ethos of writing?

I find it beautiful that, in our conversation, you place care and ethos within the same sentence. In Homeric times, the word ēthos meant dwelling, in a sense, a familiar place. For me, care is that familiar place. Familiarity itself is a co-creation. I do not believe in an ethos of writing as moral instruction, didacticism, or a prescribed ideological stance. What concerns me is a language that does not retraumatize or stigmatize its subjects. For me, that is also a political position. I am drawn to a language of liberation; one that is born through care.

How do you approach language as a tool for both rupture and repair? Do you think literature can truly heal—or does it simply name the wound?

Language as rupture and language as restoration presuppose one another. There is no language of restoration without first having a language of rupture. It resembles that old familiar slogan: “there can be no peace without justice.” To write in the age of neoliberalism is, perhaps, already a first act of rupture. I do not believe that literature can change the world or human beings, but I do believe that literature can become the place of the visible. And visibility changes the world. Literature does not heal; it names trauma, as you say. When trauma is named, it enters a trajectory toward healing.

Language is always the one that describes phenomena. What it describes, how it does so, from which perspective it stands, which story it tells – all of this can subvert the phenomena themselves. Thus, even if literature cannot change the planet or heal our wounds, it can become a refuge where we can pause, tend to them, behold them, and embrace the wronged and the suffering. That alone, even if it does not fully heal us, becomes healing in itself;
a rupture and a restoration.

With your background in sociology, mental health, and therapeutic writing, how do theory and practice converge in your literary process?

I may disappoint you with my answer, but I feel that our era has become so saturated with psychological discourse that I would prefer it not to dominate my literature. Yet, both the social and what pertains to the psyche are absolutely part of the themes I choose. The field of mental health has been, for me, a spiritual catalyst. It has forged me in a way, and it is present in my process, though under different terms. It has shaped who I am. I would say, then, that the aspects of therapy and mental health do not concern my practice directly, but they profoundly shape the way I think, through another path. From very early on, I have had both the fortune and the burden, through my work, to walk alongside human suffering. Stories have reached me that made me understand, from an early age, that pain and death are common destinies; nothing can shield us from them.

Writing is a way for me to process what surrounds me; and the stories that reach me. I certainly draw constantly from this coexistence with my work, but in an experiential way. I believe wholeheartedly in the transformative power of writing. I believe that writing changes us; the psychological richness that emerges when people are able to connect is astonishing. For me, literature is survival. If several days pass without writing, I feel imprisoned. Sociology, however, is indeed present in my writing process, but in a more methodological way. I often approach my work with a sociological methodology – almost sadistically. I consider it absolutely necessary. It is not always visible in the final result, but sometimes, to write a single sentence, I may have worked exactly as I would in a social research project, or read extensively to substantiate and understand a social theory.

*Interview by Athina Rossoglou

The post Reading Greece: Valia Tsirigoti on Literature as a Refuge and a Solace appeared first on Greek News Agenda.

Aggelos Bertos was born in 1998 and grew up in Karpathos.

Your first poetry collection Karpathia was recently published by Thines. Tell us a few things about this venture of yours.

Let me start by thanking you for the opportunity to speak about my debut collection, Karpathia. The truth is, it was harder than I expected, yet easier than I believed. I know that, in theory, those two statements contradict each other. But the journey toward publication went through at least four different publishers before finally finding its happy home with Thines Editions.

My first attempt was at the Thraka Awards in 2024, where the collection was shortlisted. Following that, I approached two other publishers, where I sensed a somewhat clientelistic relationship – not in terms of payment, but in terms of the production line. Every failure to gain a publisher’s trust in the poems of the collection – a trust which, if I had sensed it, would have inspired me to grant them the rights to Karpathia – saddened me, but did not discourage me. As trite as the metaphor may sound, each time it stumbled, a tooth of the collection broke, and I replaced it with resin. Making the collection even more worthy of trust; the very trust I wanted it to inspire in others. So, I hope that the seemingly contradictory statement I made above, now somehow makes sense.

What significance does the title Karpathia carry? How does Karpathos function not just as a setting but as a symbolic or emotional space in the collection? More generally, how is the notion of ‘topos’ imprinted in your work?

When I came to Athens for my studies, about two out of every four classmates, upon hearing I was from Karpathos, thought I meant the Carpathian Mountains. Rather amusing; it had never crossed my mind as a pun. So, let’s lay it out: Karpathian seas in poetry, Carpathian Mountains in geography. The literal connection is negligible; the literary one, abundant. I do not speak of my island as an island

I spent the first eighteen years of my life in Karpathos. I say that somewhat melodramatically, but for me, as for all its inhabitants, it was a kind of fortress. Both aggressive (just look at tourism, the “sacred legion” of the Greek economy) and haunted. I mean those tourist infrastructures that, in winter, remind us that we are really waiting for a Jonathan Harker to breathe life into them. A place, especially one in the remote islands, constructs its own set of values, which mutate, evolve, and, in the end, co-shape the national narrative. Karpathia, then, is the mythologization of the island; a place where, through its own history, the margins haunt the center, and where the poetic subject, as an inhabitant of the frontier, has both the right and the voice to engage with the questions of the present.

The collection includes explorations of sexual identity and desire. How do these intersect with place, tradition, and community in Karpathia? Are there moments of conflict, reconciliation, or transformation?

That’s a very nice question. It’s, above all, a dialectical relationship. The island exists, no matter what I do.
And I, as a queer man, exist through the island. There is conflict, and then comes synthesis. In truth, there is no real choice for anyone.

What about language? What role does language play in your writings?

I was afraid of that question. The truth is, I’ve been diagnosed with dyslexia, ADHD, dysgraphia, and dyslexia-related reading difficulties. So, from the very beginning, language and I had a somewhat cold relationship – I was afraid of it, and language, on its part, could sense my devotion to imagery. Try making sense of that. I could even say that, at times, we had a relationship of hatred. I would have an idea, and then search for the language that could express it with the greatest possible precision.

But, as with all eternal enemies, their battles offer the finest spectacle. Beyond the immature metaphors, though, language is one of my three tools – along with rhythm and image. I’m trying to perfect them. Pressed by the futility of the answer I’m offering.

How much of the voice in Karpathia is self-reflective or self-critical? Do the poems imagine ideal selves, or are they more about reconciling with imperfection?

To be honest, I’m not sure. Right now, I think it’s a projection of the self onto the island – an act of recognition, and at the same time, a shared critique between us. Tomorrow it will be something else. And as for yesterday, honestly, I couldn’t care less.

How does Karpathia engage with larger social or political issues? In what ways does personal experience become political in your work?

Everything is political, and everything is in dialogue. The body receives stimuli and processes them through its emotions, arriving at a kind of knowing. What matters is the notion of sympathy — to reject the fetish of the ego. As for the collection, it plays on two fronts: that of the Athenians and that of the Karpathians. I hope that the city dwellers will be able to see us as something other than “country folk,” and that we, the provincials, will understand that the narrative of place is grounded in community, not in nationhood or in the feverish urge to cast off our provincial skin.

*Interview by Athina Rossoglou

The post Reading Greece: Aggelos Bertos on the Notion of “Topos” Imprinted on his Poetic Work appeared first on Greek News Agenda.

Tasos Papanastasiou was born in 1964 in Thessaloniki, where he lives and works. He is a primary school teacher. He has published three other novels, all featuring Inspector Aptosoglou as the main character: 14 Days (Epikentro, 2017), Silence Doesn’t Keep You Alive (Metaixmio, 2021), and The Breaking (Metaixmio, 2023).

Your latest writing venture Κρυφό αίμα [Hidden Blood] featuring once again Inspector Aptosoglou was recently published by Metaichmio. Tell us a few things about the book.

Hidden Blood is a book that narrates a few days in the lives of three minors whom Inspector Aptosoglou meets by chance. Following his instincts, he tries to discover what they are involved in and what they are planning. In the book, the reader follows the path of these children as they sink into the dark shadows of fan violence, and watches Aptosoglou’s efforts to uncover and stop the evil that approaches at a dizzying speed.

The story of the book is inspired by the horrific murder of a 19-year-old, Alkis Kampanos, in Thessaloniki during an incident of fan violence in February 2022.

In Hidden Blood, you seem interested in not only the acts of violence but the systems supporting or enabling them — economic, educational, familial. How do you balance the novel’s crime elements with its broader sociological inquiry?

Violence – in any form, whether familial, political, or between rival supporters – is not born in a laboratory. It does not arise out of nowhere. Violence is born from social conditions, family roots, the stereotypes that are constantly nurtured, the lack of meaningful education, and a host of other factors.

In my book, I was particularly interested in identifying and highlighting the factors that give rise to fan violence, which is, let’s say, a part of youth violence. Before I started writing, but also during the writing process, I conducted extensive factual research in archives and publications. But I also spoke with people who know fan violence from the inside – lawyers, police officers, fans, supporters, parents of children involved in fan violence incidents, and people connected to football clubs. The material I gathered was, in a way, the raw material for the writing.

Then I planned the story. I didn’t want it to be just another story about bad hooligans breaking the law and the police trying to catch them. In my book, I wanted to show that these kids are not born violent. They don’t wake up one morning deciding to clash with rivals or to submit to a higher power – the idolized team. I wanted to show their path toward the dark room of fan tension, which ultimately leads to the violence that is recorded almost every day.

On the other hand, I wanted to show that there is always space and time to try to understand and help these kids escape from those nets. So, I used my hero to show the way – through understanding and awkward efforts to save these children. Inspector Aptosoglou clashes with those who pull the strings and recruit young people, while he also tries to convince the parents of these children to get involved and understand their kids in order to save them.

It is always a difficult balance when gathering factual material not to get overwhelmed by it and still manage to highlight what you want through your book, avoiding preachiness and easy condemnation. I hope that in Hidden Blood I managed to maintain that balance.

Inspector Aptosoglou has appeared in your earlier works. How has his character evolved in Hidden Blood compared to earlier novels? Would you say he is more fragile in this novel having to deal with issues of fan violence and youth recruitment?

Inspector Aptosoglou is a man who walks with his head down. Melancholic and introverted, he tries to be guided by reason and not be easily swayed by emotions. He reads philosophy books, studies Marcus Aurelius, the Roman Stoic emperor, and says he became a police officer to stop those who think they can do whatever they want without punishment.

In Hidden Blood, he is indeed more fragile, more human. He is not a superhero who can endure everything and do anything. He suffers from a serious health ordeal of his own, as well as that of the people around him, since the story takes place during the years of the pandemic. Facing issues of youth delinquency and violence, he summons his strength to save as many children as he can. A very difficult mission, as his opponents are the networks that recruit these children onto paths of no return.

How important is setting — particularly Thessaloniki — to the novel? Does the city itself function as more than just a backdrop? And, in turn, how has living in Thessaloniki shaped your perspective as an author, especially regarding social divisions, youth culture, and local violence?

Thessaloniki is a city with a very rich and compelling history. It is a place where many cultures have flourished, yet it is also a city marked by shadows as violence and obscurantism held sway through long periods of its past. It is here, too, that the crime that inspired the story I tell in Hidden Blood took place. Even the title itself echoes what unfolds almost nightly in the city's darkened streets. Clashes between rival fans that remain hidden, as no one dares to speak of them. It’s as though we have all grown used to hearing that the blood of young people is spilled in secret, and no one sees it.

Thessaloniki is the city where I was born, where I grew up, and where I still live.
A city of stark contrasts. Wealth and poverty, social injustice, hatred between football fans, tension almost every night — all these shatter the cliché of the "city of love" that often accompanies it. This city, then, is not just a backdrop where the story unfolds, nor does it simply contain it: it gives birth to it.

What about language? What role does language play in your writings?

I try to write simply. Without embellishment, without strained similes or layered metaphors. I like to write in a straightforward way, using short sentences and clear dialogue. I avoid obscure or difficult words. What I want is for the reader to feel the tension that comes from simplicity, to sense the weight of each word, the clarity of each thought conveyed through language that’s familiar and precise. I have no interest in impressing readers with vocabulary that sends them to a dictionary. And I have no desire to stretch my words across more pages than necessary, just to make a book seem longer than it needs to be.

Greek crime fiction has often been shaped by social critique and political undertones. Do you feel a connection to that tradition, or do you seek to challenge or redefine it through your own work?

I see myself as part of the tradition of crime fiction that doesn’t seek to impress, but to reveal. In my view, there’s a fine line between stories that present crimes solved by a superhero detective, and stories in which the crimes emerge from historical, political, or social conditions, with the detective as part of that same world, subject to the same forces. Crime fiction can highlight social and political issues, while also offering the reader an engaging experience. That’s what I try to do with my work.

*Interview by Athina Rossoglou

The post Reading Greece: Tasos Papanastasiou on Crime Fiction as a Means to Approach Broader Social Issues appeared first on Greek News Agenda.

Κostoula Maki was born in Ioannina. She lives and works in Agrinio as a critical social psychologist. She studied Education and Psychology (University of Patras and University of Birmingham), completed a Master’s degree in Critical Theory (Manchester Metropolitan University), and earned a PhD with a scholarship in Discourse Analysis at the University of Ioannina. For three years, she specialized in art psychotherapy.

Her articles, literary works, and critical essays have been published in newspapers, magazines, and conference proceedings. To date, the following books of hers have been published: Partial Sunshine [Metronomos–Poiein, 2017]; Oblique Landscapes [Metronomos–Poiein, 2019]; Alice After [Metronomos, 2021]; Yellow Luminous Wolf [Oursa (Isnafi), 2022]; The Eye of the Hippogriff [Oursa (Isnafi), 2025].

Your latest writing venture To μάτι του ιππόγρυπα [The Eye of the Hippogriff] was recently published by Oursa Editions (Isnafi). Could you tell us a few things about the book and elaborate on its title?

The book is a fragmentary poetic wandering – a collage of images, landscapes, events, commentaries and emotions concerning the things that preoccupy me. It is, rather, an open response of reactions and transformations to the bleak landscapes of reality, unfolding in different directions and labyrinthine paths that seek what remains elusive, marginal, sometimes threatening. In simpler terms, I wish to create spaces where we may reclaim and invert various forms of frustration: in relationships, in the critical and poetic fields, in all kinds of manipulations, political impasses, and the return of a monotonous conservative narrative about nation and history. I hope that the poems inscribe a poetic historicity that brings together the personal and the political, along with gendered perspectives on the multiple categorizations that impose restrictive norms – those that, metaphorically, “cut off one’s legs.”

Half horse, half griffin, the Hippogriff moves between air and ground, retaining the ability to produce surreal versions of reality. Its eye functions for me as a panoptic refraction and an intensive gaze beyond the routine forms of everyday movement. In that gaze, subjective details can surface, insisting on and sustaining alternative perspectives. The Hippogriff’s eye, kaleidoscopically, illuminates mythic aspects of images and encounters that sustain non-essentialist approaches. The Hippogriff remains fascinating even when it appears, at times, as an ordinary person in work clothes — no one suspecting who he is. Yet let this stand as a reminder: he has sharp claws, and he is not ashamed to use them.

There’s a clear interweaving of myth, memory, and loss throughout the collection. How do you approach the mythological not just as inherited narrative, but as a living structure for personal or collective meaning?

The themes you mention – and I’m glad you’ve traced them – are recurring personal obsessions of mine. In the poems, mythology is, I hope, dethroned from what you describe as a linear, inherited narrative and becomes a pretext for other appropriations: of myth itself, of tradition, of desire. Often stubbornly – and perhaps at times like a defiant adolescent – I am frightened by closed collective meanings that remain fixed through changes in time, history and circumstance. Here, memory serves as the key-holder of other appropriations while retaining its historicity, as it speaks through different subjectivities.

Against definitive losses, the political perhaps returns and persists through new narratives that continue to insist. Again, the wandering between theory, practice, desire and its frustration remains pivotal. It maintains its right to exist beyond predictable limits of what is deemed permissible. Myth, memory and loss form a triad not only of personal stories but also of the historicity of the Left itself. Myths are dismantled and demystified, yet events, faces, histories have been performed and remain. Memory persists, opposing its more museal versions, and loss does not signify the death that Fukuyama once hastened to proclaim when he spoke of “the end of history.”

In what I write, desire raises responsibilities, demands and hauntings. Each of us performs our own “voodoo rituals” to bring back our beloved dead – while, let’s admit, the living are sometimes deader than the dead. This triad as a living structure challenges us to tell our own stories, which are always political even in their most personal folds.

Themes of time, passage, transformation recur in your work. Which moments—either in history, personal life, or collective memory—do you feel your writing is trying to attend to or preserve?

Transformation becomes both a wager and a field of constant dilemmas — personal, ideological, historical, political and aesthetic. Rescue is always bound to the “what could have been” and the many “buts” along the way; it intertwines emotion and fact, demanding the maintenance of desire at some cost. In the personal sphere, I often transform scenes from encounters with beloved people, imagined dialogues with those no longer here, or incidents that made me feel erased through oversimplified categorizations.

I speak of gendered manipulations that often demand obedience, politeness, silence, modesty – the refusal to voice or claim what one truly wants. I speak also of continuous compromises and of being treated like an exotic bird. As commonplace as the image of the cage may be, it remains present wherever everyday interactions enact their subtle confinements. When I sense that someone wishes to place me in such a cage – to comment briefly on my oddities, then move on, or try to “train” me – and I resist.

From history – again with a sense of urgent preservation that rescues faces and events from formaldehyde and sterile sanctification – I remain passionate about the history of the Left, here and globally, and all its revolutionary movements that altered the course of discourse, of human relations, of history itself, even when they did not endure. If a collective memory is still possible, it is one that produces moments in the present, using time’s continuity in Benjaminian terms. Those who invent homeland, history and love while enduring the dreadful extensions of hegemonic theological and metaphysical narratives. A sentimentality – sometimes extreme – that mocks everything, knowing the inevitability of decay.

Your poetic language feels meticulously constructed, yet emotionally resonant, while sound and rhythm seem as primary concerns. What role does language play in your writings?

For many years, comments on my earlier books described my poetry as cerebral and obscure – lacking rhythmic cohesion and ruled by a “tyranny of concepts.” I was mainly concerned with articulating ways of seeing the world and expressing them as another fragment in the public space, while knowing my position and refusing the label of “poet.” That refusal was linked to an awareness of my limits and to my discomfort with the use of poetic identity as a display of cultural consumption or self-affirmation — a performance of cultivated elitism that often circulates in literary gatherings.

Over time, I worked more intensely on rhythm, style, and structure. The emotional element you notice remains essential, and I hope it is not melodramatic. My constant poetic wager is the conjunction of the personal and the – however overused that phrase has become – and the construction of images, moments that resist normative, restrictive narratives of the self, of others, of history. I increasingly recognize that intentions in poetry and literature are never enough. It is language itself, in its multiplicity, that determines whether a text “stands” aesthetically or functions merely as a manifesto of intentions, an informal propaganda. Each text is, after all, judged by its readers.

You have a background in psychology, discourse analysis, and literary criticism. How do these disciplines shape your literary writing? Would you say that in a way they constitute communicating vessels?

Yes, I think there is constant filtering and communication between psychology, discourse analysis, and literary criticism. What binds them are questions about critique itself – its forms, its limits, its performativity. I see the critical faculty as a continual exploration of reflexivity, a performative practice of transitions and dilemmas. The weaving together of the three – or rather four, if we add poetry – is activated through language use and through the shared understanding that language does things and is never neutral.

In the convergences of poetic and theoretical discourses, insights from social constructionism and discourse analysis traverse the various versions of myself. And although all these retain a fragmentariness that constantly escapes, the conversations between different discourses generate unpredictable shifts and open new possibilities for change — with a historicity that endures.

You’ve published in a wide range of journals and participated in vibrant literary communities. How important is dialogue—critical, aesthetic, or otherwise—in your writing life?

Every form of dialogue – aesthetic, critical, personal – remains a lasting desire that keeps me writing publicly. Its absence, too, weighs heavily, especially when public dialogue is replaced by mutual flattery or total proximity. Dialogue exposes textual gaps and dismantles closed belief systems. Every text is subject to critique – not from relativism but in recognition of Benjamin’s insight that one can offer both positive and negative critique of a text using different tools, positions, languages, and political traits.

Conflict and disagreement are desirable when they occur under critical terms, not through personal invective. I feel profoundly fortunate to have participated in diverse spaces and communities. I keep wondering how – or whether -and such dialogues, or their absence, affect different readers or end up circulating within closed circles, losing touch with the real world in its acute dystopias.

Thank you, Athina, for giving me the chance to speak about The Eye of the Hippogriff and to share my reflections on your readings.

*Interview by Athina Rossoglou

The post Reading Greece: Kostoula Maki – “There is constant filtering and communication between psychology, discourse analysis, and literary criticism” appeared first on Greek News Agenda.

Athena Psyllia has been working as a psychologist and as a translator of Portuguese-language literature for the past 30 years. She has translated works by José Saramago, Gonçalo M. Tavares, António Lobo Antunes, José Luís Peixoto, Dulce Maria Cardoso, José Cardoso Pires, Ondjaki, Jorge Amado, Bernardo Carvalho, Raduan Nassar, Paulo Scott, and Paulina Chiziane.

She has worked in institutions focusing on deinstitutionalization, addiction recovery, research, child protection, and in private psychotherapy practice. She is a graduate of the Department of Psychology of the School of Philosophy, Education and Psychology at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. She pursued further training in psychology as a scholarship holder at the University of Lisbon, where she also attended courses in language, literature, and translation. She specializes in systemic therapy, psychological assessment, and counseling for substance dependence. She is currently a postgraduate student in Gender Studies at the Hellenic Open University.

What made you turn to literary translation?

It was a long process that led me to literary translation. As a child, my English and French lessons were the highlight of my week, and I was an eager reader of literature by the age of 12. When I was 17, I started learning Russian, hoping to read literature in the original. I studied psychology at the Philosophy Department of Aristotle University and had the opportunity to learn Portuguese during Erasmus and a postgraduate scholarship at the University of Lisbon. Upon my return, I brought back several books of Portuguese literature with the idea of proposing them for publication to editors in Greece. My dear friend Alexandros Panoussis, who was working at the time for Kastaniotis Editions as a proofreader, told me that the editor was looking for translators for José Saramago’s The Gospel According to Jesus Christ. I submitted a sample of my first translation, carefully corrected by my friend -and now co-worker ever since- and I got my first assignment! I cannot explain why, but foreign languages and translation were my favourite play as a child and remain so today.

Which have been the main challenges you were faced with throughout your decade-long involvement in literary translation?

During my three decades in literary translation, the challenges have varied considerably. It has been both challenging and very creative to combine my translation work with my primary field, mental health. Translating has also been financially challenging. Moreover, there is never enough time for revision. Ideally, I would like to let my translations “ferment” for a year before revising them. Sometimes there are too many work offers, and sometimes too few -or none at all. But let me be clear: if luck has ever stood by my side, it has been in my work with translation. In 1996, when I started, very few works of Portuguese literature had been translated into Greek. My wildest fantasy was to translate ten excellent books by contemporary authors. Kastaniotis Editions and Antaios Chrissostomides gave me the chance to make that fantasy a reality in a very short time.

You have translated more than 30 works of Portuguese literature, among them a large part of the works of the Nobel laureate José Saramago. How demanding is translation of such major works of literature?

By now, the number has risen to 45–47, if we count the next book to be published and a translation that was commissioned and paid for but never published. It was mostly delightful. Among Saramago’s books, Blindness was the most demanding because the content was very upsetting. Cain was difficult for me, as it was his last book, which I was translating when I learned of his death. Translating is an act of concentration and even meditation; some books require more meditation than others.

How would you comment on the relation between a writer and his/her translator? Could it be described as a gradually developing love affair?  

No, I would describe it as a relationship of comradery. The authors I have worked with are very attentive; they answer my questions immediately and always acknowledge the work of translation. On my side, I am protective: I ensure that the book comes out as they want it, I ask about their intentions and preferences, and I try to fulfill them. That said, there are a few authors I have never tried to contact, e.g., António Lobo Antunes, whom I have met in person but who does not use a computer, and Raduan Nassar, a very private person.

Most scholars reckon that the content of a book cannot be separated from the particularities of the language that gave it shape. In this respect, where does the role and responsibility of the translator lie? Can translation ever be unethical?

I find it unethical to assume that my opinions are more relevant than the author’s. I also find it unethical to translate from a colonizing perspective- simplifying things and not bothering to bring the cultural references to readers.

Despite their arduous and pivotal work, translators usually remain invisible: their names are often not even mentioned, while they are ignored by critics and readers. What could be done to bring translators to the forefront?

I agree that our work -and consequently our names- remain invisible. However, I don’t feel I am the right person to answer your question; I haven’t done my share to change things, and I regret it.

With AI-powered tools becoming increasingly sophisticated, what challenges and opportunities do you think this presents for professional translators today?

Again, I don’t have definitive answers. I am reading about it and trying some AI-powered tools to see what they can do for me, and I have been impressed- not in literature translation, though. Both my jobs (psychotherapist and translator) are somehow threatened with radical change, and I am not sure to what extent I will be willing to follow this change.

Could translation contribute to a better understanding between cultures and translators act as cultural ambassadors between countries?

I believe that my original motive for translating Portuguese literature was exactly that: I was passionate about Portuguese literature and culture, and I needed to share my passion. There are also some very passionate people working in the cultural sectors of both the Embassies of Portugal and Brazil; they have been very resourceful and imaginative with the events they host, and I participate whenever I can.

*Interview by Athina Rossoglou

The post Reading Greece: Athena Psillia on Introducing Portuguese-Language Literature to Greek Readers appeared first on Greek News Agenda.

José Luís Costa was born in 1978 in Lisbon, where he currently lives. He studied Classical Philology at the Faculty of Arts of Lisbon. He has translated works by Yannis Ritsos, Katerina Gogou, Dimitris Liakos, and Yannis Stigkas. His most recent translation is the complete poetic works of C. P. Cavafy. He is also a conference interpreter and a poet.

Reading Greece* spoke to José Luís Costa about his venture to translate Cavafy’s complete poetic work into Portuguese, the challenges he faced, also discussing how appealing Greek literature is for Portuguese readers, and the role of translators as cultural ambassadors fostering deeper understanding between peoples and cultures.

Your latest venture is a translation of C.P. Cavafy’s complete poetic work to be published by Assírio e Alvim. What inspired you to take on Cavafy, and which were the main challenges you were faced with?

I must say that the idea of translating all of Cavafy’s poems was not originally mine, but a suggestion from the publishing house. In Portugal, there are already at least three translations of the Cavafy canon – one of them covering the entire canon, and the other two covering most of the poems. Since a particular translation stands out – that of the Portuguese poet Manuel Resende – I hesitated a little before giving a positive answer. In the end, it seemed to me that the time had come for Portugal to have an edition that includes all the well-known poems, as well as those outside the canon.

Cavafy’s poetry is known for its subtle irony, historical layering, and philosophical depth. How do you preserve these qualities in Portuguese without losing the fluidity of the original text?

I do what I can. Of course, the most difficult aspect in the case of Cavafy is preserving the coexistence of different registers – katharevousa, demotic, poetic or oral speech, for example. The truth is, this is often an impossible feat. Yet it is paradoxical that, although this coexistence is so characteristic and so important, the poems seem to withstand translation with relative ease. Something is inevitably lost, as always happens with the translation of poetry, but the core of the poem is so clear and strong that we almost forget the issue. For this reason, I would even say that there are poets far more difficult to translate than Cavafy.

You have translated works of Yannis Ritsos, Katerina Gogou, Dimitris Liakos, and Yannis Stigas into Portuguese. What initially drew you to modern Greek poetry, and what challenges did you face in bringing these voices to a Portuguese-speaking audience?

I have loved poetry since my adolescence, even before I learned Greek. I write poetry myself, so it was only natural for me to translate in the field that interests me most. The challenges are considerable, as the average Portuguese reader knows very little about contemporary Greek poetry. Not even Cavafy is widely known, except among those who are well-versed in poetry. Unfortunately, I cannot say that my work has significantly changed this landscape.

How appealing do you consider Greek literature to be for Portuguese readers? And, in turn, what is that may draw a Greek audience to Portuguese literature?

In both cases, I would say that the interest in knowing what is happening in the other country may come from the fact that we are almost like siblings – in the sense that we are both part of the PIGS, that we share a glorious past which somehow weighs on us, that we have sun, sea, good food, and a similar way of life. Yet most people in both countries do not realize this, so let’s say we are siblings who were lost and grew up apart. Filling that gap, that is a motivation. I must also say, however, that Greece has done much more work in this regard. I am struck by how many contemporary Portuguese writers have been translated into Greek, and I am sorry that the reverse is not true.

Most scholars reckon that the content of a book cannot be separated from the particularities of the language that gave it shape. In this respect, where does the role and responsibility of the translator lie? Can translation ever be unethical?

Honestly, I don’t have a theoretical framework regarding these matters. I am far more interested in the act of translation itself than in translation studies, so to speak. Of course, I consider a bad translation an unethical act – much like building a bad bridge would be. Fortunately, in the case of a bad translation, no one is likely to die from its immorality!

Despite their arduous and pivotal work, translators usually remain invisible: their names are often not even mentioned, while they are ignored by critics and readers. What could be done to bring translators to the forefront?

Their names should appear on the covers of the editions, for example. But I also don’t believe that translators need to have excessive visibility. Let’s return to the bridge analogy: it doesn’t seem tragic to me that we don’t know the names of the engineers who built them. I am speaking of the general public. Those who are more directly interested in poetry and literature will know.

Could translation contribute to a better understanding between cultures and translators act as cultural ambassadors between countries?

Of course! How could we enter a culture, embrace a different mindset, without translations? Let translators be ambassadors, yes; though discreet ambassadors.

*Ιnterview by Athina Rossoglou

The post Reading Greece: José Luís Costa on Introducing Greek Poetry to Portuguese Readers appeared first on Greek News Agenda.