Photo © Themis Zapheiropoulos
The poet Maria Topali was born in Thessaloniki in 1964. She studied law in Athens and completed her PhD in Frankfurt a. M. as a scholarship holder of the Daimler-Benz Foundation. Since 1996 she has written poetry critiques and reviews for the journal Poiisi (Poetry) and its successor Poiitiki (Poetics), as well as for daily paper Kathimerini [Sunday edition, since 2006] and has translated prose and poetry from German, including selected poems by Brecht, Huchel, Lasker-Schüler and the Duineser Elegien by Rainer Maria Rilke (published by Patakis ed. 2011). From 2006 to 2008 she taught poetry translation at EKEMEL (European Translation Centre of Literature and the Humanities). In 2007/2008 she taught a course on Poetics and Space at the University of Thessaly, Faculty of Architecture. Her first volume of poetry, Tea Set, was published in 1999 and her second, London and other poems (short-listed for the poetry award of the literary magazine Diavazo), 2006. Since then she has published the books Vermion Descent (2010, Patakis ed.), a theatre musical The Dance of the Middle Class (Okto, 2012) and also a book in collaboration with Konstantine Matsoukas entitled For four hands (Gavriilidis, 2013). Her poems have been translated into German, Italian and Slowenian. She works at the National Centre for Social Research (gr. EKKE) in Athens and is the mother of two children.
Most recent publications
Offener Brief: Maria Topali an Rainer Maria Rilke, Edition Romiosini, 2018. bilingual edition German-Greek. Translation from Greek by Dennis Püllmann.
Griechische Lyrik aus dem 21. Jahrhundert. Translated from Greek by Torsten Israel. Edition Romiosini, 2018. – as ed.