Lena Divani

Lena Divani was born in Volos in 1955 and moved to Athens for university. She studied political science and public administration at the University of Athens, then completed a doctorate in diplomatic history at its Law School. Her academic work examined modern Greece’s relations with the Great Powers and its Balkan neighbours. Questions of borders, minorities and foreign policy formed part of this historical field.

She taught the history of foreign policy at the Athens Law School until resigning in 2022. Alongside research and teaching, she developed a literary career across short stories, novels, theatre and children’s books. In a 2007 interview she described experimentation and change as pleasures of writing. Moving between genres became a way to change scale, voice and the relationship with a reader.

Her public cultural work has also linked books with other media. Historical studies became programmes that she presented on Cosmote History, bringing research to television audiences. She has served in organisations concerned with books, authors’ rights and human rights. Across these activities, the historian and the storyteller remain connected: public events enter individual lives, while a shift in narrative viewpoint can make ordinary arrangements appear unfamiliar.

Εργαζόμενο αγόρι (Working Boy) first appeared in 2000 and returned in a new edition in 2023. In an interview about the novel, Divani explained that she reversed conventional roles assigned to men and women. The comic displacement invites readers to notice habits that can seem natural simply because they are familiar. It also makes words for work, authority and everyday expectations especially useful to observe.

Her historical writing takes a different approach to the relation between private and public worlds. Ζευγάρια που έγραψαν την ιστορία της Ελλάδας (Couples Who Wrote the History of Greece) (2019) asks how political figures’ intimate relationships and public actions affect one another. Το πικρό ποτήρι (The Bitter Cup: Kapodistrias, Roxandra and Greece) (2020) focuses on Ioannis Kapodistrias, Roxandra Sturdza and Greece. Ονειρεύτηκα τη Διδώ (I Dreamed of Dido) (2022) combines research with an imagined encounter with the writer Dido Sotiriou: a hybrid biography rather than a transcript of a conversation.

Divani can also move the viewpoint outside the human world, giving a cat the narrative voice in Εγώ ο Ζάχος Ζάχαρης (I, Zachos Zacharis). In Έτσι τελειώνει ο κόσμος (This Is How the World Ends), published in April 2026, a friendship between two boys develops into a struggle for power against the background of Greek politics, media and economic crisis. Changing narrators and social positions keeps the question of who sees and speaks central to her prose.

Divani connects contemporary Greek literature with historical inquiry and an alertness to social roles. Her satire offers a useful starting point for language practice because a small grammatical change can accompany a change of character without changing the person’s abilities. After listening to the adapted passage, write two original sentences about a profession: ο νέος συγγραφέας γράφει and η νέα συγγραφέας γράφει. Replace νέος / νέα with another matching adjective and read both aloud. Notice the stable noun ending, the changing article and the adjective. Then describe who narrates one of Divani’s books. This is practice in Modern Greek agreement and viewpoint, inspired by her work, rather than a summary of every character in the novel.

• Εργαζόμενο αγόρι dates from 2000; the Patakis edition is from 2023.
• Divani left her university position in 2022.
• Έτσι τελειώνει ο κόσμος was published in April 2026.
• A cat narrates Εγώ ο Ζάχος Ζάχαρης.