Maria Mitsora

Maria Mitsora (Greek Μαρία Μήτσορα) was born in Athens in 1946. In a 2013 interview with the Athens magazine LiFO she called herself a true Athenian: she was born in a maternity clinic on Solonos Street, grew up in Nea Smyrni and has lived in Kolonaki since 1964. She studied sociology in Paris, at the Sorbonne and at Vincennes, where she submitted a study on the dynamics of small groups. In interviews she has recalled London in the 1960s and Paris in May 1968.

She has travelled widely, from the Arctic Circle to Haiti and from Beijing to Sandinista Nicaragua, the Orinoco and Bogotá, and she learned Spanish to know Latin America better. She says she began to write after the age of thirty. She calls herself an “underground” writer of those years, but not a beat one, and names a circle of friends that included the painter Alexis Akrithakis and the poet Tasos Denegris; their revolution, she says, was above all aesthetic and largely a reaction to the military dictatorship. In the late 1970s she worked with the magazine Σήμα (Signal), which was taken to court for “offence to public decency”, and she agreed to be the publishing director of the magazine Αμφί in its first year because nobody else would.

Her first book, the story collection Άννα, να ένα άλλο (Anna, Here Is Another), appeared in 1978. In November 2025 LiFO published a piece from Ανθός ΜεταΝοήματος, a book in progress announced by Patakis for 2026.

Mitsora’s novels are Σκόρπια δύναμη (Scattered Strength, 1982), Η περίληψη του κόσμου (The Summary of the World, 1985), Ο ήλιος δύω (1997) and Καλός καιρός / μετακίνηση (Good Weather / Moving, 2005). In the first issue of LiFO, the writer Stathis Tsagarousianos described her earlier books as dedicated “to those who lived with lack”: hard, aphoristic, rock and punk in manner. He added that Σκόρπια δύναμη had become a gospel for young people in the 1980s. Ο ήλιος δύω enters the world of heroin; its title joins ο ήλιος (the sun) to δύω, the first-person form of the verb, instead of the expected ο ήλιος δύει (the sun sets). With Καλός καιρός / μετακίνηση, she told him, she wanted “to write something positive”.

Her shorter prose is just as varied. Με λένε λέξη (My Name Is Word, 2008) is an autobiographical narrative for the Patakis series Η κουζίνα του συγγραφέα (The Writer’s Kitchen). Από τη μέση και κάτω (From the Middle Down, 2014) gathers stories set in Athens, one of them in the old centre near Monastiraki. Η κυρία Τασία και ο Γουλιέλμος Καταβάθος (Mrs Tasia and Gulielmos Katavathos, 2021) builds poetic prose around a courtyard lost in a garden. In 2018 Yale University Press published sixteen of her stories, translated by Jacob Moe, as On My Aunt’s Shallow Grave White Roses Have Already Bloomed; the publisher notes that they span forty years and move from Athens to imagined Latin American towns and science-fiction settings.

Most of Mitsora’s recent books are published by Patakis, which reissued her 1978 debut in 2007, and the Yale translation, in the Margellos World Republic of Letters series, brought her to English-language readers. In 2025 LiFO called her a quiet but highly significant presence in Greek literature. For a Greek task, start from two of her titles. Read ο ήλιος δύει (the sun sets), then Ο ήλιος δύω, and name the person of each verb: third person, then first. Then look at Με λένε λέξη (My Name Is Word), where the everyday με λένε… (my name is…) introduces a word instead of a person. Write two first-person sentences of your own in the same pattern, for example Με λένε Μαρία (My name is Maria) and Με λένε βροχή (My name is rain). These are our own practice sentences, not quotations.

• Her novel title Ο ήλιος δύω pairs “the sun” with a first-person verb, where everyday Greek says ο ήλιος δύει.
• Her autobiographical book Με λένε λέξη plays on με λένε…, the phrase Greeks use to give their name.
• She studied sociology in Paris and wrote a study on the dynamics of small groups.
• She became publishing director of the magazine Αμφί in its first year because, as she recalls, nobody else was willing.