Amanda Michalopoulou is the author of eight novels, three short story collections, a theater play and a novella. She has been a contributing editor at Kathimerini in Greece and Tagesspiegel in Berlin. Her stories have appeared in Harvard Review, Guernica, PEN magazine, World Literature Today, Words Without Borders, Asymptote, The Guardian, Brooklyn Rail among others.
She is a winner of the Revmata Award (1994), the Diavazo Award for her novel Jantes (1996) and the Academy of Athens Prize for her short story collection “Bright Day” (2013). The American translation of her book I’d Like won the International Literature Prize by NEA in the US (2008) and the Liberis Liber Prize of the Independent Catalan Publishers (2012). Her stories and essays have been translated into twenty languages. Her novels Why I killed my best friend and God’s Wife, were short-listed for the ALTA National Translation Award in the US. Her short story Mesopotamia was selected for Best European Fiction 2018 (Dalkey Archive).
She had various literary grants from the DAAD and LCB in Berlin, the Shanghai Writers Association, Edward Albee Foundation, Ledig-Rowohlt, Bellagio Rockefeller Foundation etc. She was a fellow at the Iowa International Writers Program.
She lives in Athens, Greece where she teaches creative writing.
“Phaedra on Fire” is a theatre play, commissioned in 2020 by Athens Epidaurus Festival. Roughly based on Euripides Hippolytus it redefines Phaedra as a woman in search of lost vitality and critically contemplates the role of women in Ancient Greek tragedy, classical literature and the patriarchy. Directed by Yannis Kalavrianos, “Phaedra on Fire” was performed on 30 and 31 of July 2021 in the Little Theatre of Ancient Epidaurus.
“It may sound like a lie: I am His wife,” is the arresting opening declaration made by God’s Wife’s unnamed narrator, who will always be known through her role as an appendage, “at His side.” This premise immediately raises issues of power, domination, truth and belief. God’s Wife is ultimately a meditation on the power of literature to create a space of imaginative play. It is a love story, a philosophical treatise on the nature of faith and divinity, a self-conscious meditation on the nature of writing and creativity, and a feminist tract, all held together by the compelling authenticity of the narrator’s voice. Her voice is, of course, shaped by Amanda Michalopoulou’s inimitably spare and masterfully evocative prose, which, like the narrator’s mother’s brand of storytelling, uses few words and eschews didacticism.
“Tell me about Your wives,” I insist. “How did You choose them? What was their skin like, their eyes, their voice? Which one was the cleverest, which one the nicest? How many were there? Where are they buried?” When I pepper Him with such questions, He finds an excuse to leave the room. God’s way of saying that the conversation is over.
In Amanda Michalopoulou’s Why I Killed My Best Friend, a young girl named Maria is lifted from her beloved Africa and relocated to her native Greece. She struggles with the transition, hating everything about Athens: the food, the air, the school, her classmates, the language. Just as she resigns herself to misery, Anna arrives. Though Anna’s refined, Parisian upbringi
a short story collection published by Dalkey Archive in 2008
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