Niki Marangou

Niki Marangou was born in Limassol, Cyprus, in 1948. Her father came from Famagusta and her mother from Kozani in northern Greece. In a 2008 interview with the writer Michel Fais she said she had been lucky to grow up in a house with books, old books. From 1965 to 1970 she studied sociology in West Berlin. Later she wrote that she needed the drowsy afternoons of Nicosia to remember who she was.

Back in Cyprus she worked for about ten years as a dramaturge at the State Theatre of Cyprus. In 1980 she opened the bookshop Kochlias in Nicosia, which also published books, and she ran it until 2007. She was a painter and printmaker too: she held seven solo exhibitions, the first in 1975, and took part in the graphic arts biennial in Ljubljana (1993) and the Cairo biennial (1996). For a time she taught pottery to blind children. She belonged to the Hellenic Authors’ Society and the Cyprus Writers’ Association, and she travelled widely, above all in the Middle East, Turkey and Egypt.

On 7 February 2013, according to reports published that day, she was killed when the car carrying her overturned near Fayoum, about 100 kilometres south of Cairo. At the time she was writing a novel set in nineteenth-century Athens, with parallel stories in Famagusta in 1945 and in the present.

Marangou wrote in Greek across many forms. Her first poetry collection, Τα από κήπων (From the Gardens), appeared around 1981. Αρχή Ινδίκτου (Beginning of the Indiction, 1987) takes its title from the Byzantine calendar, in which the year began on 1 September. Her poetry and prose won Cypriot state prizes, among them for Αρχή Ινδίκτου and for the stories of Μια στρώση άμμου (A Layer of Sand, 1990). In 1998 she received the Cavafy Prize for poetry in Alexandria, and in 2006 the Academy of Athens gave a poetry award to Divan (2005), a collected edition of her poems from 1967 to 2000.

Places and journeys run through her books. Γιατρός από τη Βιέννη (Doctor from Vienna, 2003), which her obituary in LiFO called autobiographical, follows the story of a Cypriot doctor between Famagusta and Vienna; its German translation (2008) is titled Von Famagusta nach Wien. She said this book allowed her to write about Vienna and Alexandria. Her story collection Ο δαίμων της πορνείας (The Demon of Lust) was named by the magazine Diavazo among the ten best Greek story collections of 2007, and Γεζούλ (Gezoul, 2010) is a novel published by Estia in Athens. She also wrote Cypriot fairy tales for children and translated Joachim Sartorius’s book Alexandria into Greek.

Her name lives on above all through The Niki Marangou Project at King’s College London. Its translation prize, founded in 2016, has since 2019 asked university students in Britain to translate a poem of hers from Modern Greek into English, and an annual memorial lecture is held in her memory: the eighth took place at the House of Cyprus in Athens in April 2026, on the definition of poetry. Try a short route exercise based on her Γιατρός από τη Βιέννη: write down the two cities of its German title, Αμμόχωστος (Famagusta) and Βιέννη (Vienna), then narrate a journey of your own in three Greek sentences, for example Πήγα από τη Λεμεσό στη Λευκωσία (I went from Limassol to Nicosia) and Γύρισα το βράδυ (I came back in the evening). Mark which sentences come from memory and which you could prove. These are our own practice sentences, not her words.

• In 2004 her poem Τριαντάφυλλα (Roses) was chosen to hang in hospital waiting rooms of the NHS in the United Kingdom.
• Her family joined two ends of the Greek world: a father from Famagusta in Cyprus and a mother from Kozani in Macedonia.
• Shortly before her death she sent LiFO a report from the Jaipur Literature Festival in India; the magazine republished it in 2022.
• The name of her bookshop, Κοχλίας, is a learned Greek word for a snail’s spiral shell, also used today for a screw.