Guest of the ilb 2003
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 | 
p.jpg)