Greek State Prize for the Novel in 1999

Short-listed for the ‘ARISTEION’ European Literature Prize

Eleni, or Nobody is based on the true story of Eleni Altamoura-Boukoura from the Greek island of Spetses. Altamoura-Boukoura was the first Greek woman painter to receive a formal training in art. To acquire this training she had no choice but to dress up and live as a man for two years in Italy. While living in Florence, she had two children by the Italian painter Saverio Altamoura whom she subsequently married. He later abandoned his family, however, and she returned with her children to Athens where she worked as a painter. Tragically, both her children died at an early age. In response she burned her works and withdrew to her family home in the island of Spetses where she remained for twenty years. Rumours of insanity and witchcraft surrounded the sad, solitary figure of Greece’s first woman painter.

Her eventful life, still shrouded in considerable obscurity, recently stimulated interest by the revelation of new details. In the novel we see a continuous blend and contrast of enlightened knowledge and superstition, the sane and the insane, innocence and guilt, separation and reconciliation, the beckoning world and seclusion, artistic creation and its destruction, identity and the futility of trying to attain it, the construction and elusiveness of ethnicity, the existence and the abolition of time, the living and the dead.

Kastaniotis, 288 p. 2004 (1^st published by Agra,1999)