Gefyra Book Club: Niki: A Novel by Christos Chomenidis, trans. Patricia Felisa Barbeito
(Other Press, 2023)

Discussion led by Professor Sharon Gerstel, Director, UCLA SNF Hellenic Center
and Dr. Eirini Kotsovili, Senior Lecturer, Global Humanities at Simon Fraser University

Saturday, May 17, 2025
10 a.m. Los Angeles / 8 p.m. Greece
Via Zoom

Link to be provided soon.

This academic year’s book club is held in English and will feature Greek books in translation. For future book selections and meeting dates, click here.

Born in 1938, Niki, the daughter of the deputy secretary general of the Greek Communist Party, is swept up in turmoil before her first birthday: her parents are arrested, and she joins her mother in exile on an island near Santorini. Growing up, she experiences the Italian and German invasion, the Nazi occupation, and the civil war that came after, often caught between her socialist values and those of the right-wing establishment, to which half her relatives belong. Through her memories and the stories of her family, with roots on both coasts of the Aegean Sea, Niki also tells the history of Greece and Asia Minor from the late nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth. Her remarkable tales, full of humor and verve in spite of hardship, are populated by working-class heroes, privileged elites, daring revolutionaries, and free-spirited bohemians.

Christos Chomenidis was born in Athens, Greece. In addition to writing novels, Chomenidis has hosted his own nationally broadcast radio show, written scripts for cinema and television, and writes a column for Greece’s largest newspaper, Ta Nea. His novel Νiki won the 2021 European Book Prize, and his works have been translated into numerous languages.

Patricia Felisa Barbeito is Professor of American Literatures at the Rhode Island School of Design and a translator of modern Greek fiction and poetry. Her translations include Elias Maglinis’s The Interrogation, which was awarded the 2013 Modern Greek Studies Association’s Constantinides Memorial Translation Prize, M. Karagatsis’s The Great Chimera, and Amanda Michalopoulou’s God’s Wife, which was short-listed for the 2020 National Translation Award.

This program is made possible thanks to the Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF).

Links to purchase book:

https://www.amazon.com/Niki-Novel-Christos-Chomenidis/dp/1635421977

The Gefyra Book Club meeting is part of Gefyra (Bridge), a collaborative program established by the UCLA SNF Center for the Study of Hellenic Culture and the Simon Fraser University SNF Centre for Hellenic Studies with support from the Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF).