Sophia Nikolaidou

One of the most distinctive voices out of Thessaloniki, Sophia Nikolaidou made her literary debut in 2007 with the short story collection Blonde, Run Over. Alongside her writing career, she also spent 24 years teaching Greek in public education. Since 2019, she has been teaching Creative Writing at the School of Journalism and Mass Communications at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and the relevant MA program of the Hellenic Open University. She is the author of seven novels, short story collections, plays, screenplays, and several academic studies, including one on the intersection between literature and new technologies in 2009. In 2010, she received the Athens Prize for Literature for her novel No Friends Tonight and, in 2015, her novel The Scapegoat was translated into English and published in the United States by Melville House. The book opens a dialogue between the past and the present, shedding light on the dark corners of post-war Thessaloniki, while also portraying the grim reality in Greece at the peak of the financial crisis in 2011. Her next book So Far, So Good changes gears and chronicles the writer’s personal battle with breast cancer, winning the 2015 National Special Theme Award for promoting dialogue on sensitive social issues. Her latest work, Our Own Children, delves deep into yet another tough subject, hooliganism and youth violence.