Meet the Greek candidates who have been chosen to participate in the 2020 residency programme as part of the Ulysses' Shelter 2 project. The project’s objective is to build a network of exchange literary residencies for young prose and/or poetry writers and literary translators.

Dimitris Karakitsos was born in Volos, Magnesia, Greece in 1979. He studied at the School of Business and Economics in Larissa. His first book, a collection of poems titled “The Cats of the Poet D. I. Antoniou”, was published in Athens by To Rodakio (2012). His short story collection “Venusberg” was published in 2015 by Antipodes. His third book “Strongmen” (Potamos, 2016) is a description of Greek wrestlers and strongmen who were active between 1900-1939. The short story collection “Vartholomaios Olivie” was shortlisted for the book prize of the Greek literature magazine “O Anagnostis” in 2018. His fifth book “Zacharias Scrip” is a satire. He has also published poems and short stories in literary magazines (“Thraka”, “Neo Planodion”).

Marilena Papaioannou was born in 1982 in Athens, where she grew up. She studied Molecular Biology and Genetics in Alexandroupolis and wrote her thesis in Geneva. Afterwards, she worked as a researcher in New York, until 2013 when she returned to Greece, where she has been editing and translating biology textbooks, pop science books, and scientific articles.

In 2013, she published her first novel, Nikitas Delta (Estia Bookstore Publishing). The book was nominated for the State Award for First-Time Author and the Anagnostis Magazine Award for First-Time Author. She also received the Klepsidra/Enastron Award for Best Young Author from the literary magazine “Klepsidra”, along with Yannis Asteris.

In 2016, she published her second book, the novella “Kateveni o Kamouzas stous fournous” (Kamouzas Coming at the Furnace), which was nominated for the Anagnostis Magazine Award for Best Novella in 2017 and the Klepsidra Award for Best Young Author the same year.

She is currently looking for a publisher for her third book, the novel “To nou sou ston Meli” (Keep Melis in Mind), while gathering material for her next work.

She writes small articles for Yustra magazine, where she explains basic biological phenomena.

Thomas Tsalapatis was born in Athens in 1984. He studied theater at the University of Athens. His first collection “Daybreak is Slaughter, Mr. Krak” received the National Poetry Prize in 2012. His second collection “Alba” was published in 2015 and has been translated into French by Nicole Chaperon in 2017 and published by Desmos. In 2016, he wrote “Encore”, a play which was staged in Attis Theatre in Athens, directed by Theodoros Terzopoulos. The script and the poems of the performance were published in 2017 by Mov Skiouros under the title “Pnigmos”. In 2018, his third poetry collection “Geographies of the Fritzs and the Langs” was published.

In 2018, he won first place in the Poetry category in the competition “Premio InediTO-Colline di Torino” for the poetry collection "Περιστατικά" (Peristatica; Incidents). The same year, his play “Monica Vitti Remembers No More” was staged in Maison de la Poésie (House of Poetry) in Paris as a stage reading, directed by Laurence Campet and translated by Clio Mavroeidakos. The play was staged in Athens in 2019 and published the same year by Mov Skiouros.

He has been writing articles for newspapers, magazines and web magazines since 2008. He is currently a columnist for the Saturday edition of «Εφημερίδα των Συντακτών» (Efimerida ton Syntacton) and the Sunday edition of «Εποχή» (Epohi).

Several of his poems have been translated into English, French, Spanish, Italian, Arabic and have been included in more than 8 anthologies.

He has translated and published poems written by W.B. Yeats and W.H. Auden. His writings can be found at Groucho Marxism: http://tsalapatis.blogspot.com.