Athina Papadaki

Athina Papadaki was born in Athens in 1945. She studied political science and worked as a journalist. Her first poetry collection, Αρχάγγελος από μπετόν (Archangel of Concrete), appeared in 1974. Later books include Ωχροτάτη έως του λευκού (Pale Almost to White, 1989) and Λέαινα της βιτρίνας (The Shop-Window Lioness, 1992).

Ο θάνατος και η κόρη (Death and the Maiden) followed in 2001. Με λύχνο και λύκους (With a Lamp and Wolves), published in 2010, received an Academy of Athens award. A collected volume brought together poems from 1974–2014 in 2016. Σκιά ψυχής (Shadow of the Soul) appeared in 2023, continuing a body of work concerned with the forces that threaten and sustain human life.

Papadaki’s cultural activity also includes children’s literature and radio. She produced Τα παραμύθια μας (Our Fairy Tales), where children were the creators of the stories. She edited a volume on Sofia Mavroeidi-Papadaki in 1998 and wrote essays and book reviews. Her poetry has travelled through translations and international festivals, including Poetry International Rotterdam in 2000. The written poem and the listening audience form two connected parts of this career.

Papadaki’s poetic world gives familiar creatures and objects unsettling new roles. A shop-window lioness or an archangel made of concrete brings bodily and material images into contact with desire, confinement and imagination. The images can feel like fragments of a fable, yet their force remains open to more than one reading.

In Το φίδι (The Snake), published among Τρία ποιήματα (Three Poems) in Hartis in November 2022, changing skin becomes an image of continuing transformation. The poem’s compressed syntax makes an ordinary animal action carry an abstract question about change itself. Its companion poems place snowmen against heat and an earth-dwelling figure on a movement towards light. Small physical events acquire a larger, more troubling reach.

Shadow of the Soul brings this imaginative energy to social and existential concerns. Its publisher describes threats facing human life alongside the creative resources that resist them: enchantment, surprise and individual imagination. Papadaki’s work with children gives another form to creative participation. In her radio programme, children supplied the stories, bringing their own inventions into a shared listening space. Across these different forms, language makes room for transformations that everyday description alone might overlook.

Read The Snake in the Hartis archive, then work with the adapted Greek passage. Underline όταν and the present-tense verbs. Make a new everyday sentence: Όταν αλλάζει ο καιρός, παίρνω ζακέτα. Move the όταν clause to the end and read both versions aloud, keeping the meaning. Ask a partner Τι κάνεις όταν κάνει κρύο; and answer with your own routine. Write a second example about what you do when it gets dark. This exercise practises recurring situations and responses in Modern Greek. Return to the poem afterwards and notice how its change of skin opens a much less ordinary question.

• Children created the stories for her radio programme Our Fairy Tales.
• With a Lamp and Wolves received an Academy of Athens award.
• She participated in Poetry International Rotterdam in 2000.