Rea Galanaki
On Sunday 1 December 2024 at 6pm, the Library of Fougaro in collaboration with Kastaniotis Books welcomes Rea Galanaki for a presentation of the new edition of her book Where does the wolf live? Coming on the fiftieth anniversary of the restoration of democracy in Greece, the new edition comes with a highly personal afterword by the author about the years of the dictatorship.
The presentation will be moderated by journalist, philologist and translator Erifyli Maroniti, who will then discuss with Rea Galanaki her overall oeuvre on the occasion of the Grand Prize for Literature 2023 she was awarded this year.
The session is open to the public.
about the book
Where does the wolf live?
It is a fine, almost invisible line that turns a major experience into a historical event within us. The line does not care how many years go by before this happens, does not totally disconnect the one from the other, does not idealise either the experience or the historical event.
Having been out of print for decades, the book Where does the wolf live? —dedicated "to the friends from’67 to ’74", is published again precisely fifty years after the emblematic 1974. It balances on that fine, almost invisible line that is drawn, voluntarily or otherwise, at the end of a fifty-year period. The literary text remains exactly the same, in the same mode of expression I used then as I proceeded inexorably towards a narrative speech. Here the confined spaces (student apartment, prison, paternal house) converse incessantly and comfortingly with the openness of art of the fairy tale, of the dream, of an excursion, of the roads. A personal afterword traces my role in the events I lived — in History, in other words, as it detaches itself from the one's experiences, gets forgotten by most but still demands our empathy, our humility, our reflection.
So, this is everything I lived through with the people of those distant yet ever-present friendships.
Rea Galanaki
Rea Galanaki
Born in Herakleion, Crete in 1947, Rea Galanaki studied History and Archaeology in Athens. She has published novels, short stories, poems and essays. A founding member of the Hellenic Authors' Society, her awards include two State Literary Awards (Novel Award, 1999; Short Story Award, 2005). She has also won the Kostras & Eleni Ourani Prose Award of the Academy of Athens (2003), the "Nikos Kazantzakis Award" of the City of Herakleion, Crete (1987) and the Reader's Choice Award of the National Book Centre of Greece (2006). Her recent novel Absolute Humiliation won the Balkanika Literary Award, while its French translation was nominated for the Prix Méditerranée Étranger (2017). Her book The life of Ismail Ferik Pasha was the first Greek novel to feature in the "UNESCO Collection of Representative Works" (1994), while Eleni, or Nobody was one of the top three nominations for the EU Aristeion Prize (1999). Her books have been translated into seventeen languages: English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Ukrainian, Dutch, Czech, Catalan, Bulgarian, Swedish, Lithuanian, Turkish, Arab, Chinese, Hebrew, Albanian.
