The next guest of the Archaeological Museum of Thessaloniki Reading Club is the author Michalis Makropoulos, who will discuss his novella “Margarita Iordanidi” and the short story collection “Stories from a Bygone Future”, both published by Kichli Editions.
About the Author
Michalis Makropoulos was born in 1965 in Pagrati, Athens. He studied biology at the University of Athens. He lived in Thessaloniki for nine years and since 2010 has been residing with his family in Lefkada. He spends significant time in the villages of Epirus—Delvinaki in Pogoni, where some of his stories are set, and Greveniti in Eastern Zagori. He has published fourteen literary works for adults, six of which are available from Kichli Editions: The Judas Tree (2014), Tsotsigia & Ω’ μ (2017), Black Water (2019, winner of the 2020 State Award for Short Story-Novella and the 2020 Short Story-Novella Award from the magazine O Anagnostis), The Sea (2020), Aris (2021, co-authored with poet Eleni Kofterou), and Stories from a Bygone Future (2022). He has also published A Journey through Pogoni (Fagotto, 2013), the essay on cinema The River of Time (Crete University Press, 2023) and six children’s books, including The Golden Oak (Kaleidoscope, 2020), which won the 2021 State Award for Children's Literature. His short stories are published in various magazines. He also works as a translator.
About the Books
Athens, 1990s. The first economic migrants arrive from Albania. Kostas, who comes from Epirus, moves to the capital, studies economics, and opens an accounting firm. He meets a woman working in an advertising agency, Margarita Iordanidou. They marry and have two children. Suddenly: "My name is not Margarita. I am not your mother." In his new novel, Margarita Iordanidi, Makropoulos delves into the secrets and lies of a seemingly ordinary life. He explores lives without roots or wings, lives that are foreign, gray, and borrowed. Lives that could belong to the person next door.
The stories in Stories from a Bygone Future, even if they wear the guise of "future history," speak to the present, to what has already happened—they are stories from a bygone future. At their core always lies the human being: the vulnerable, suffering individual, facing the relentless dominance of images, a devastating war, blind and raw violence, the experience of the world as childhood trauma, and the enigma of human identity. With existential contemplation, simple poetic expression, and restrained eloquence, Makropoulos's writing emotionally engages the readers while awakening their thought.
