Guest of the Reading Club of the Archaeological Museum of Thessaloniki for the month of April is the author Christos Chomenidis with his novel "Pandora", published by Patakis Editions.

A few words about the author

Born in August 1966 in Athens, Christos Chomenidis graduated from the Law School. In 1993, he published "The Wise Child". Twelve more novels and dozens of short stories followed, which have been translated into French, English, Spanish, Czech, Lithuanian, Turkish, and Hebrew. In 2015, readers honored "Niki" and in 2019 "Phoenix" with the Public Book Award for Best Novel. "Niki" was also awarded the Best Novel Prize by Anagnostis magazine and the State Prize for Literature. In the spring of 2017, "Niki" was adapted for the theater, directed by Stamatis Fasoulis. In November 2021, a fifteen-member committee of leading European journalists, chaired by Danish screenwriter Adam Price, awarded "Niki" the European Book Prize (Prix du Livre Européen). Christos Chomenidis still lives in Kypseli and insists on hoping for the best. His email address is: chomenidis@gmail.com.

A few words about the book

I longed to create a heroine the same age as the 21st century. A young woman who doesn’t fit into stereotypes, who doesn’t fulfill hopes, who doesn’t confirm fears. Who lives day by day, enjoying her contradictions, suffering because of them. Who cuts and is cut, sometimes sober, sometimes drunk. Who moves in and out of parallel worlds without settling, without resting in any of them. Sometimes fearing the future, sometimes feeling it within her grasp, longing to squeeze it and drink it dry, leaving nothing untried, untasted…

Who engages in politics out of ignorance of danger. And falls in love, madly, with full knowledge of it.

A girl in her prime, shaped in the most fluid environment, bombarded from the cradle with information, theories, experiences, where whatever is confirmed is immediately refuted. A girl so different and yet so similar at her core to Odysseas Elytis’s “Maria Nefeli” and Manolis Hiotis’s “Strange Girl”.

I present to you Pandora Stafylla.

"If you expect me to be horrified by what you say about me, you don’t know me at all."

"Horrified? You mean we should both be horrified? Not at all! Your life seems just fine to me. Wherever you go, I’m coming with you!"

"As if you have any other choice…"