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Kallia Papadaki was born in Didymoteicho, Greece, and grew up in Thessaloniki. She works as a professional screenwriter. Her critically acclaimed short-story collection 'The Back-Lot Sound' won the Diavazo Journal New Writers Award. September, her first feature-length script, won the 2010 International Balkan Fund Script Development Award, received the Nipkow Scholarship in Berlin, and premiered at the 48th Karlovy Vary International Film Festival. Dendrites, her first novel, was awarded the EU Prize for Literature, shortlisted for the Anagnostis Best Novel Award, and won the Clepsidra Best Young Author Prize. Karen Emmerich is a translator of modern Greek literature and an Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at Princeton University, where she directs the Program in Translation and Intercultural Communication. Her translation awards include the National Translation Award for Ersi Sotiropoulos's What's Left of the Night, the Best Translated Book Award for Eleni Vakalo's Beyond Lyricism, and the PEN Poetry in Translation Award for Yannis Ritsos's Diaries of Exile (co-translated with Edmund Keeley). She lives in Brooklyn.
Praise for DendritesWorld Literature Today's Notable Translations of 2024""Dendrites is not your conventional immigration story, and that's partly attributed to Papadaki's adroit storytelling. Combining the seemingly incongruent styles of stream of consciousness-reminiscent of Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse--with the density of plot in nonlinear novels--echoing Gabriel Garcíiacute;a Máaacute;rquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude--the author produces a rich narrative with fluidity and crispness that readers relish."" --World Literature Today ""I loved this fierce, beautiful book. Kallia Papadaki is a truth teller who, with uncommon grace and undeniable power, brings her central characters and the challenges they face in 1980s Camden brilliantly to life. Add Karen Emmerich's marvelous translation to the mix and you have an undeniable winner. I can't recommend it strongly enough."" --LAIRD HUNT, author of the 2021 National Book Award finalist Zorrie""Dendrites is a novel that follows three generations of a Greek immigrant family living in the United States. Papadaki's attention to the minor is a driving force in the novel. Dendrites is filled with ordinary people, working-class immigrants as they strive for an American dream that always seems just out of reach. Personal joys and crises, chance encounters, and historical events imprint themselves on these lives, altering their directions in small and profound ways. Karen Emmerich's translation brings Papadaki's compassionate and intelligent storytelling to English-speaking readers for the first time, and the writing feels as alive in English as it does in the original Greek. It is a breathless book, unspooling in long ribbons of thought. Sentences stretch out across the page, holding on for as long as they can, and yet not a word is wasted. Dendrites shows us that everything matters: every life, every encounter, every ordinary day, every piece of falling snow-- despite the knowledge that like everything else, it will all eventually melt away."" --Asymptote Journal ""What possibilities do individuals really have when they find themselves in devastating conditions? This question, of Kafkaesque extraction, unites the lives of the characters who inhabit this extraordinary novel. Marginality is not a choice, but a circumstance and a fatality, and Kallia Papadaki explores these margins in the lives of Greek emigrants with profound insight and empathy. The result is a wise and sensitive novel, but not only that, because Kallia is a virtuoso in the art of storytelling, which is increasingly a rarity these days. The result is a cohesive novel, with highly elaborate literary language and a perfect narrative structure. And whose characters shake us to the core.""--RONALDO MENÉNDEZ ""In a fascinating and absorbing read, Dendrites captures the intricate and convoluted lives of everyday people and, like a museum, preserves their stories, aspirations, fears, and ambitions. Dendrites is an enthralling, multigenerational novel about a Greek immigrant, Nondas Kambanis, who struggles to make a life for himself in the US and his son, Vassilis, who although born in the ""promised land"" is equally destitute, wondering whether to make the opposite journey back
