The National Grand Prize for Letters has been awarded to Rhea Galanaki for her overall contribution to literature.
The jury said :
Having previously made her mark in poetry, Galanaki imbues her novels and short stories with the same poetic perception, creating webs of connotations that draw readers into multiple layers of images, feelings and reflections. To read the sum of her work is to engage in a multidimensional experience, as in the recurring motif of ‘women’s life after life’ (Eleni, or Nobody), or the multiple fantasy substrata of the ‘labyrinth’ (The Century of Labyrinths), to name but two examples. Rea Galanaki has managed to carve a new path in the way we perceive historiography and historical experience in the modern literary text. At the same time, ethnic and gender identities present themselves movingly in her work, with their internal rifts and all their postmodern contradictions. To achieve this, Galanaki’s heroes record the past, discover ancestral memories, collect testimonies, go through subtle psychological fluctuations, struggle existentially with themselves and seek self-knowledge.
Throughout her work, Galanaki listens to the past with a profound awareness that memory preserves the historical formation of the present. If we consider all Galanaki’s literary works to date, from the emblematic Life of Ismail Ferik Pasha, her first and prize-winning novel, to Emmanouil and Ekaterini, an autobiographical and self-referential work, the reader – as well as the contemporary or future scholar of her oeuvre – will identify significant narrative techniques, framing devices, philosophical reflection, literary transformation of actual testimony, carefully-constructed discourse, well-defined cultural, ideological, and philosophical context, and elaborate literary manoeuvres. At the same time, the reader will penetrate deep into the linguistic aesthetics of the author and discover her respect for the Greek language, a fact that undeniably indicates her high narrative skill. Galanaki’s works have been translated into seventeen languages.
Rhea Galanaki was born in Heraklion, Crete in 1947. She studied History and Archaeology in Athens.. She has been twice awarded the Greek National Book Award (1999 Eleni, or Nobody, 2005 An Almost Blue Hand). She has also received the Athens Academy Award for Prose (2003, for her novel The Age of Labyrinths), the Nikos Kazantzakis Award of the Heraklion Municipality in 1987 and the National Book Center of Greece Readers’ Award in 2006 for her fictional biography Silent, Deep Waters. Her novel The Life of Ishmael Ferik Pasha is the first Greek book to be included in the Unesco Collection of Representative Works (1994), while Eleni, or Nobody was shortlisted for the Aristeion Prize (1999). Her books have been translated into 17 languages. Most of them are free again.