iris literary agency

Kasdaglis Christoforos

Kasdaglis Christoforos

Christoforos Kasdaglis is a journalist and author. After being unemployed himself, he thought about simply invite the unemployed to share their stories online. The result is a huge outpouring of untold personal accounts of life without work in crisis Greece. 155+1 of these have been chosen and edited into a moving book. Kasdaglis had already focused on the plight of the unemployed in an earlier book, Anonymous Bankrupts, a collection of sketches published in 2012 about the effect of the crisis on people’s lives including his own experience with unemployment.

Diary of the Unemployed: 155+1 True Stories

In Greece 29% of the population are unemployed. Yet the ‘unemployed’ often fade into a faceless mass. Their introspection, their guilt, their shame and their resignation lead them to shut themselves in their homes and not attempt to speak, to protest, to complain, to shout. They often prefer themselves to remain invisible, in order not to provoke pity.” The Diary of the Unemployed began as an online experiment where “the unemployed themselves write about their experiences, their torments, they outline their demands to a society that must urgently reverse its priorities. First the unemployed and then the middle-class. First the unemployed and then the minimum wage. First the unemployed and then the property tax. First the unemployed and then pensions and rebates.”

Kastaniotis, 2014, 221 p.

Published in Non Fiction
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