On Monday, November 28, 2022 on the broadcasting program “Faraway words”, author and assistant professor Aglaia Blioumi was a guest.
Aglaia Blioumi was born in 1972 in Stuttgart, Germany to Greek immigrant parents. She is a graduate of the Department of German Literature of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, doctor at the Department of German Literature of the Free University of Berlin and serves as a permanent Assistant Professor at the Department of German Literature of the University of Athens. She has taught “Creative Writing” and “Research Methodology” at the Hellenic Open University. She made her literary appearance with the German-language short story “The Foreign Within Me” in the anthology Divergences and Transitions, 1997. Poems of hers have been published in various German-speaking and bilingual (German/Greek) anthologies.
Born in Stuttgart, Germany she knows firsthand the reality of being a 2nd generation immigrant, racism, perceptions, but also the privileges brought about by this kind of “hybrid identity”, as she says. The main topic of the discussion is migration literature, which the guest has researched and worked on. All these thoughts, impressions and experiences of a life divided between two homelands are captured with the precision offered by bilingual perception, in the book “Apochaireta tin ti Stoutgardi, Astyanakta”, which is the author’s first literary venture in Greek, and is about modern Greek migration through the eyes of a 2nd generation immigrant. The book, which is published by Kedros publications, will be presented on November 29, 2022 at the bookstore “Ianos”. Ms. Blioumi told Natasa Vissarionos and Giannis Stelios Tzirvelakis about all the components that contribute to the novel: about the pages written in German, the elements from her own story that emerge through the life of the protagonists, the Gastarbeiter and all those events and experiences of a child who is born and lives in Germany by Greek parents.
The broadcasting program also had Naya Boltetsou as a guest, one of the founding members of GIWA: Greek International Women Awards. It is an institution that awards and honors Greek women whose work in their professional field is of international scope. The goal of the institution is for these women to become an inspiration for the rest, but also the empowerment of the female gender. The history of the institution, its aspirations, objectives and existence, as well as the procedure for submitting proposals and declarations for awards were discussed, as they may be of concern to every woman in the audience.