A popular and well-established literary figure in Greece, Mrs. Amanda Michalopoulou attracts an ever-growing international audience through the many translations of her works abroad. She recently visited the United States to mark the upcoming translation of her book God’s Wife. “Greece in America” managed to sit down for a coffee with her and chat about, what else, literature! 

Mrs Michalopoulou, God's Wife will be released in the United States this coming September by Dalkey Archive. This is your seventh novel overall and the third being translated and published in the US. Its title welcomes the reader to experience a more humanized perception of the Divine. Is this depiction at the center of the book's narrative?

You may call it humanized, yes. Actually this could be a very romantic idea of what we expect from divinity, from ideal forms, from what we call truth. This is a least what my narrator expects from her husband, God himself; tenderness and understanding and compatibility. But it doesn't work this way for Him. He expects blind faith and submission. So after idealizing, falling in love, fantasizing, her deception follows. Divine proves to be eerie and even hostile when faced with questions. I hope this can be seen as an allegory for every idealization. Every couple's life is filled with misunderstandings and this falling from Grace. I guess one could read this book as a fairy tale for grown-ups too.
 

How do you seek for inspiration? An old cliché wants the life of an author to include an abundant time of solitude and reflection. Is an author able to exist without these two elements?

Solitude is essential, but so is social interaction; life provides triggers and ideas and deceptions that turn into plot. A novel is always an unanswered question about life, in the form of narration. If it becomes theory then we don't have a narration anymore, a story to be absorbed in. We are all nourished by stories that lead to other stories and other stories, it is like a vortex of stories in which we also inscribe ours. This is what I would call inspiration, the palimpsest of stories we've heard, we've read, we've invented.
 

At the beginning of the month you visited New York City and presented your latest book tilted Baroque, at an event co-sponsored by the General Consulates of Germany and Greece.  What is your take regarding the transatlantic literary collaboration? Is there space for further enhancement of the interaction between Europe and the United States?

Literature is a universal language. We all care about the same things. When we read a story well told, we identify and we get real feelings. We feel empathy, anger, fear. American narratives have a lot to tell us about how to be straightforward, how to build better dialogues (I am thinking of Lucia Berlin here, of Raymond Carver). European narratives teach us about introspection and the depth of myths (I am thinking of Olga Tokatczeg or Laszlo Krasznahorkai). We all teach each other through stories. And without rhetoric involved, in the best of them.
 

And a more focused question on the future of Modern Greek literature. As an acclaimed Greek author whose work has the privilege to be translated and published throughout the world, including highly competitive markets like the US one, what suggestions do you might have towards strengthening Greece's presence on the global literary stage?

To write good books. To reinvent forms. To be playful and serious at the same time, to work with both the heart and the intellect. There is no such thing like national literature. When we talk in those terms it means some major writers have strengthened language in such an unexpected way that their language belongs to everyone. Good literature, this is the key.

Amanda Michalopoulou is the author of eight novels and three short story collections. 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 short story Mesopotamia was selected for Best European Fiction 2018, by Dalkey Archive. “Why I killed my best friend”, her latest book in translation, was short-listed for the National Translation Award in the US. 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 currently lives in Athens, Greece where she teaches creative writing.