An award-winning novelist of the Greek-speaking world, working toward an English language debut. A proponent of magical realism, she applies an original and multi-laced use of imagery, alongside a creative experimentation with literary form, concocting singular worlds in both languages.
Over the past decade, critics and scholars of Greek literature have welcomed this distinctive voice with great interest and to high acclaim. Her unique voice has attracted an increasingly wider and younger audience, securing a place in the vanguard of Greek and Cypriot fiction writers.
Vivaldi’s Wigmaker
A baroque tale exploring Venice of 1797 and highlighting the historical portrait of Antonio Vivaldi, seen through the eyes of the wigmaker of his operas Hypatia.
Ginger
Second title of a trilogy. The story of a Pre-Dynasty embalmer, called Ginger because of his red hair, whose naturally mummified body is found today in the British museum.
Blue
The first chapter of the book begins in 1605 in a freezing afternoon at a convent in Aix en Province where a nun is possessed by demons, to move later on in the second chapter to the bedroom of the noble man Ambroise de Laon, in his chateau of the Middle Ages town of Cluny just waking up today from recurring nightmares and dreams. The Blue color is spread everywhere…
Captive
A stranger meets a woman, Erminia, after she invites him to stay in her remote house by the sea having witnessed through her window his fainting on the beach; only to realize soon after he recovers that he is kept captive in her house.
“Being a fiction writer has never been easy or simple as anyone who has attempted this arduous task knows quite well. It needs a lot of concentration and much more patience that one might imagine. It is not so much the thought process that accompanies the author’s imagery of his or her inner world, by itself a most intriguing aspect of fiction writing, as much as the taxing transference of that inner world on paper. The creation of the right personages, the finding of the appropriate ambience, the setting of the scenes, and the selection of the words, phrases and conversations that best serve the author’s attempt to depict on an inanimate object such as a paper, his most intensive animus, his innermost psyche.
The writing becomes even more complex when the fiction writer takes on the even more onerous task of delving into history. It is here that the author needs to exhibit his or her ability to research thoroughly the historical facts, investigate documents and papers, visit libraries extensively and travel widely to uncover hidden secrets, hitherto unknown facts, stories and fables that perhaps emerge from real events that took place centuries ago. Then the writer can set up the novel in a historical background but may adorn it, if he or she is so inclined, with modern aspects and trends with which the reader of today may better identify. Although writing in the past he may allude to persons and events of later years, endorse it with symbolisms and infuse it with narratives that extend or intertwine with images beyond that particular era, as Umberto Eko’s historical novel “The Name of the Rose.”
All the above characterise the novels of Effie. Well researched, exhibiting a thorough understanding of the subject, facts and fiction merging sublimely into each other, the writing of the author captivating the reader, opening up new unknown worlds that prompt him or her to wish to learn more. The horizons are thus widened, the thought process is enhanced, the knowledge deepens. The reader is left with an insatiable hunger to swim deeper into the mysteries that make up the human being.”
Stelios Nathanael
Former President of the Supreme Court of Cyprus