Waiting to give a talk about multilingualism in fiction writing at the University of Iowa, October 31, 2023.
NEKTARIA ANASTASIADOU is the 2019 winner of the Zografeios Agon, a Greek-language literary award founded in 19th-century Constantinople. In 2023, she represented Turkey and Greece as a visiting fellow at the University of Iowa’s prestigious International Writing Program.
Her debut novel, A Recipe for Daphne, was shortlisted for the 2022 Runciman Award and longlisted for the 2022 Dublin Literary Award. It was also a finalist (with an Honorable Mention) in the 2022 Eric Hoffer Book Award and a 2021 Women’s National Book Association (US) Great Group Read. Elif Shafak included it in her list of favorite Istanbul novels for The New York Times.
Her second novel, Στα Πόδια της Αιώνιας Άνοιξης/At the Foot of Eternal Spring, written in Istanbul Greek, was published in Greece by Papadopoulos in 2023. It was characterized by Nobel-candidate Ersi Sotiropoulos as “A vivid book, narratively generous to the reader, without ever being too broad…Nektaria Anastasiadou knows how to write while maintaining balance.”
Anastasiadou’s short stories have appeared in anthologies including Stories from the Center of the World (City Lights, 2024) and Κωνσταντινούπολη: Νόστος στον χώρο και τον χρόνο/Constantinople: Returning Home in Space and in Time (Ellinoekdotiki, 2024) as well as in The Markaz Review, at which she is a contributing editor.
Her writing has been presented at Duke University and included in syllabi at the University of Iowa, Boğaziçi University, Bilkent University, and Boston College.