Immigrant autobiographers

We usually associate immigration with manual labour, with hard currency wired back home, with struggles to learn a new language, with social marginalization, low self-esteem and a painful process of assimilation. But that is not the whole story. Here, we shall be presenting two very different examples: a Greek author who settled in France as an adult, became famous writing in French and won a number of French literary awards; and an Albanian author who, having arrived in Greece at a similar age, writes exclusively in Greek and has made a name for himself as an author and columnist. These immigrant autobiographers tell us how they came to make the leap, and what difficulties they encountered on the way to making their ambitious dreams a reality.

The “Us and Them – Us as Them” cycle is about immigration, a burning issue throughout Europe. The cycle’s wide-ranging discussions will focus on both the Greek and international dimension of immigration.