Eugene Trivizas

Evgenios Trivizas was born in Athens in 1946. He studied law and economics at the University of Athens and then went to England to study criminology, the science of crime, and he has lived between the two countries ever since. For many years he taught criminology at the University of Reading, west of London, and he has also taught in Athens and published academic work on crime and the law. The children's writer and the professor are the same person, and he likes to say that both jobs are about imagining what people might do.

His career as a storyteller began in the early 1980s with Φρουτοπία (Froutopia), a comic strip about a land of talking fruit, which became a popular puppet series on Greek television. Books followed at a rapid pace: picture books, novels for children, plays, fairy tales for radio, poems and jokes. Several of his plays have been staged in Athens, including at the National Theatre, and his stories have been turned into musicals and operas for children.

Trivizas still writes in both Greek and English and travels between Athens and England. His books have been translated into many languages. He is a living author, so this page keeps to his public work.

Trivizas plays with language the way children do. He invents words, bends proverbs, gives his characters absurd names and loves a plot that turns a familiar story inside out. In Τα τρία μικρά λυκάκια (The Three Little Wolves and the Big Bad Pig), first published in English in 1993 with pictures by Helen Oxenbury, three gentle wolves build ever stronger houses, of bricks, of concrete, of steel, and a pig with a sledgehammer and dynamite knocks each one down, until a house of flowers finally softens his heart. It is a story about kindness, and about how old tales can be told differently.

Φρουτοπία (Froutopia) is a whole world where fruit and vegetables run a country, with a detective called Pikos Apikos and villains who want to steal the harvest. Τα 88 ντολμαδάκια (The 88 Stuffed Vine Leaves, 1997) is a book of 88 short stories and riddles that can be read in any order. Η τελευταία μαύρη γάτα (The Last Black Cat, 2001), one of his best-known novels, tells how superstition leads to the hunting of all the black cats on an island, seen through the eyes of the last survivor; children read it as an adventure and adults as a story about prejudice. Το νησί των πυροτεχνημάτων (The Island of Fireworks) and dozens of other titles range from nonsense verse to fairy tales with several alternative endings, which the reader chooses. His Greek is lively and spoken, full of rhymes and sound-play, and it is read aloud in nurseries and classrooms across the country.

Trivizas is a classic in his own lifetime. Extracts from his books appear in Greek primary-school readers, teachers use his stories to teach reading, and his titles fill the children's shelves of every Greek bookshop. The puppet series Φρουτοπία is remembered by everyone who watched Greek television in the 1980s, and its songs are still sung. His plays for children are staged every season in Athens and Thessaloniki, and Τα τρία μικρά λυκάκια is a standard picture book in English-speaking countries too. For a learner, his books are the ideal first reading: start with the Greek edition of the three little wolves, which you probably already know in your own language, and then try one of the short tales in Τα 88 ντολμαδάκια.

• He is a professor of criminology, and wrote his children's stories alongside academic work on crime and the law.
• The Three Little Wolves and the Big Bad Pig was written in English first, with illustrations by Helen Oxenbury, and only then published in Greek.
• Some of his books offer several endings and let the child pick the one they like.
• Froutopia began as a comic strip and became a television puppet show whose heroes were fruit and vegetables.