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RITUAL, FICTION, COGNAC & KOLIVAMoon Station Athens invites you to a special event with novelist Sofka Zinovieff with guest appearance by writer and translator Joshua Barley.
Join us for a salon with a difference with novelist and former anthropologist Sofka Zinovieff. Sofka has spent her life between London and Greece with stints in Italy, Russia, the Scottish Hebrides Islands and other places. Her recently published tragicomic novel ‘Stealing Dad’ digs deeply and playfully into the subject of the sudden death of a beloved father, a wild, difficult Greek artist living in London.
She will talk to us about how the idea for her novel came about, the troubles of losing a loved one in a culture that has mostly lost its communal rituals and how different it is from losing someone, for example, in Greece. At a time when rituals have disappeared from large swathes of the western world, leaving a dangerous gap in their absence, Greece has retained its traditions rooted firmly in thousands of years of orthodox and pagan communal lore.
Sofka will delve into how humans have conspired to grapple with the shape that death leaves behind and particularly what she calls ‘the Greek way of death’.
We will sit around a table, taste some koliva which Sofka will be ordering from a patisserie next door to Athens’ First Cemetery, drink Metaxa (aka Greek Cognac) and listen to an ancient lament from the mountains of Epirus by Joshua Barley (author-translator of ‘Greek Folk Songs’).
Sofka is the author of numerous fiction and non-fiction books including the celebrated ‘Red Princess’, ‘Eurydice Street’, ‘Putney’ and most recently ‘Stealing Dad’. She’s also the writer and presenter of the brilliant eight-part podcast Athens Unpacked.
Moon Station Athens,
2nd Floor, Kolokotroni 11, Syntagma
Arrival from 7pm
Books for sale
(Koliva is a dish based on boiled wheat that is used liturgically in the Eastern Orthodox Church for commemorations of the dead).
Please rsvp to [email protected]
Moon Station Athens is a pop-up salon that connects writers, artists and other creatives living in Athens or passing through. It's the brainchild of novelist, writer and former TV journalist Rana Haddad and is hosted in the studio of designer and artist Olympia Zographos.
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Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Κολοκοτρώνη 11, 105 62 Αθήνα, Ελλάδα, Κολοκοτρώνη 11, 105 62 Αθήνα, Ελλάδα, Athens, Greece
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