Dimitra Kolliakou

Dimitra Kolliakou was born in Athens in 1968 and grew up there. She studied classical philology at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens and, after about a year of work, left Greece at twenty-two. In Scotland she wrote a doctorate in theoretical linguistics at the University of Edinburgh; her academic research dealt with the syntax and semantics of Modern Greek and English.

According to her publisher’s biography, she taught linguistics at Newcastle University in England from 1995 to 2010 and then at Université Paris Diderot from 2010 to 2014. She has also led creative-writing workshops, at Patakis publishers in Athens from 2013 to 2016 and at the Hellenic Open University from 2017 to 2019. She now lives in Paris, where she teaches literature in a school, and she is a member of the Εταιρεία Συγγραφέων (Society of Writers).

She published her first book at thirty-three and has kept writing in Greek through all her years abroad. In interviews she has said that she lived as a foreigner for many years and moved between several European cities, and that the cosmopolitan outlook of her fiction comes from that life. In 2023 she admitted that she does not know whether the feeling of ξενιτιά (life far from home) can ever be “cured”.

Her first novel, Το μαγείο (The Enchantment, Estia, 2001), opens with a dream in which a grandfather has turned into a cicada. It was followed by Θερμοκρασία δωματίου (Room Temperature, 2006), a novel set in Jerusalem, and Η αρρώστια των βουνών (Mountain Sickness, 2009), four tightly written novellas set in England and India that the newspaper Τα Νέα read as variations on female passion. Ήμισυ του παντός (Half of Everything) appeared in 2015; its learned title echoes the ancient proverb Αρχή ήμισυ παντός (The beginning is half of everything).

Her widest recognition came with Αλφαβητάρι εντόμων (An Alphabet Primer of Insects, Patakis, 2018): twenty-four linked stories, one for each letter of the Greek alphabet, and behind each letter an insect and the people whose lives it crosses. The publisher describes it as inspired by “the Europe that charms, the Europe that disappoints”. The author chose not to print a genre label on the cover, because the stories hold together almost like a novel. The book shared the 2019 State Prize for Short Story and Novella, for books of 2018, with Dimitris Kanellopoulos, and also won the short-story prize of the magazine Ο Αναγνώστης (The Reader).

Αταραξία (Tranquillity, 2022) follows a Greek writer in Paris through the Covid lockdowns and a journey to China, borrowing Epicurus’ word for freedom from fear. Καλυψώ (Calypso, 2024) returns to the world of the Odyssey: on her island Calypso lives with Melanthi, the last servant left to her, until a stranger from our own time arrives.

Kolliakou belongs to a generation of Greek prose writers who live abroad yet publish in Greek for Greek readers, and her books remain in print with Patakis in Athens. The 2019 State Prize brought her story cycle to a wider public, and Greek newspapers and magazines regularly interview her about exile, Europe and the craft of fiction. Her titles also show how a modern novel can carry ancient words: αταραξία from Epicurus, ήμισυ from an old proverb.

Try this: take the idea of her Αλφαβητάρι εντόμων, without copying its stories, and make your own five-letter Greek insect primer: α – η ακρίδα (grasshopper), κ – το κουνούπι (mosquito), μ – το μυρμήγκι (ant), π – η πεταλούδα (butterfly), τ – το τζιτζίκι (cicada). Then write one sentence for each letter.

• In Αλφαβητάρι εντόμων she placed the bee under the Latin letter B, to play on the phrase “to bee or not to bee”.
• She kept the Greek letter Μ for το μυρμήγκι (the ant), in a story about school.
• Before the State Prize she had already received the EKEBI Jim Wilson award for a first-time author, the Athens Prize for Literature of the magazine (δε)κατα and the Petros Charis Foundation novel prize of the Academy of Athens.
• She has said that, for her, truth in fiction is the first requirement, and links this to Dionysios Solomos’ call to regard as national whatever is true.