iris literary agency


Soloup

Soloup

Soloup (Antonis Nikolopoulos) is a well known caricaturist who collaborates with big newspapers and magazines in Greece. He studied Political Sciences at the Panteion University and obtained a PhD (Cultural Technology and Communication) by the University of the Aegean. He has published 13 books with comics and cartoons and his Phd on History of comics in Greece. His first graphic novel Aivali received the prize of the best comic and of the best scenario in 2015 Comicdom Athens. It is translated in French and Turkish and it is the first graphic novel which is subject of an exposition of Mpenaki Museum travelling all over Greece. In 2015 he participated at the collective exhibition “Ella” at Tricromia gallery in Rome and in the Ravenna festival. Aivali was shortlisted for the Doctors without Borders Prize.

The Collector, a modern adult fairy tale, talks about the alienation of children from one parent after a divorce. The protagonist, Dionysis, waits every morning to take his daughter to school, according to the court’s decision. The mother, however, chooses to put her in a cub. Dionysis begins to record the cubs’ numbers and thus turns into an unusual "collector" of cubs’ numbers.

Aivali deals with the violent expatriation that took place during the war in Asia Minor between the Greeks and the Turks, in the wake of World War I. First the Christians were driven out of their ancestral lands in 1922, and then the Muslims were removed from their homes during the population exchange between Greece and Turkey. This graphic novel is a pastiche of 5 stories. One story deals with today (chapters 1 and 6), while the others (chapters 2 through 5) go back to the past, to the humanitarian disaster of 1922 in Asia Minor and to the population exchange (Greeks and Turks, Christians and Muslims) as stipulated by the Convention of Lausanne.