Soti Triantafillou

Soti Triantafillou was born in Athens in 1957.  After studying pharmacology in the Greek capital, she did her doctoral work in Paris at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in the fields of history and history of civilization.  She wrote a Ph.D. in Urban Studies at the University of New York and then studied Romance Languages and Literatures at the University of Athens.  Triantafillou works as a lecturer, translator, editor, and journalist. Not only has she edited six monographs on the cinema, but since 1990 she has also produced an extensive literary oeuvre with bestseller qualities.

In Greece, the cosmopolitan Triantafillou is perhaps the most successful writer of her generation.  She embodies precisely the self-ironic city neurotic that one has to date sought in vain in Greek literature.  What also distinguishes her from her contemporaries is that she not only writes about the Greeks in Greece, but she immediately situated three of her novels in the U.S.  In her first novel ‘Sávvato vrády stin ákri tis polis’ (1996) as well as in ‘Poor Margo’ (2001) that was written in English, with great narrative lightness Triantafillou thematizes the subversive dreams of fortune of the young generation in the big cities of the 80s; she tells of long, intoxicated nights, of a passion for the cinema and music, of friendship and love, and of course always about failure.  On the other hand, ‘O ipójios uranos’ (1998) is about the radical sense of being uprooted and the lack of orientation experienced by second-generation emigrants in the American back country.

Triantafillou’s historical studies focused in particular on the beginnings of socialist politics – this finds expression in two controversial historical novels, which juxtapose the collective history of progress with individual microcosms; fictive figures are placed next to historical characters like Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg. Carefully researched and masterfully staged in a whole host of settings ‘To ergostásio ton molivión’ (2000) follows the meandering destiny of an unconventional Greek family, which from the end of the 19th century until the beginning of the Second World War attempts to actively involve itself in the revolutionary processes in technology, politics, and art.  In contrast, in her work ‘Albatros’ (2003), Triantafillou uses a couple in which the two partners are very different from one another to outline the history of the suffragettes.

© international literature festival berlin

Meres pou emiasan me mantarini
Ägokeros
Athen, 1990

To enaerio treno sto Sitwell
Delfini
Athen, 1994

Savato vradi stin akri tis polis
Polis
Athen, 1996

Avrio, mia alli chora
Polis
Athen, 1997

Der unterirdische Himmel
Zsolnay
Wien, 2001
Übersetzung: Birgit Hildebrand

Ftochi Margo
Patakis
Athen, 2003

Albatros
Patakis
Athen, 2003

Die Bleistiftfabrik
Zsolnay
Wien, 2004
Übersetzung: Birgit Hildebrand

Übersetzerin: Birgit Hildebrand