With family roots from the island of Crete, Niki Chalkiadaki was born in Trikala. She studied Greek literature and linguistics at Aristotle University in Thessaloniki, completed a Master’s in creative writing at the University of Western Macedonia in Florina, and is currently working on a second Master’s in performing arts. In 2013, on my back with fever (Mandragoras, 2012) won the best first book award at the National Symposium of Patra, and was short-listed for the Greek National Award for Poetry. The poems here are from her third collection, little she-cannibals (Mandragoras, 2022), a work, she says in an interview in Greek News Agenda, is a “dive into a tender, terrifying, animalistic and dry space where the boundaries between the real and the imaginary are blurred.”
