Spyros Vgenis was born in 1991, grew up in Korydallos and studied literature and philosophy in Athens and London. The Age of the Reindeer (Antipodes edition) is his first book.

Roberto Bolagno’s Distant Star, Paul Celan’s Lichzwang, Henri Misso’s The Barbarian in Asia (in English translation by Sylvia Beech), and a friend’s pirated comparative version of the Tao Te Ching.

Rosalind from As You Like It. Because I would be an exile in the woods with my cousin.

Les Murray, Nikos Gabriel Pentzikis, Gerald Manley Hopkins and Charles Peggy. The girls will volunteer to sit at another table: Carson McCullers, Emily Dickinson, Virginia Woolf.

The lamb does not find the ants attractive: the ants find the lamb attractive. I learned this from Chuang Tzu.

“Caster died for your sins” by Vine Deloria and “Cahier d’un retour au pays natal” by Aime Seser.

The book I most often take with me is Selected Poems by John Asbury.

I paint from imagination, observation, memory and luck. Definitely from the books I’ve been reading lately and science books. From anime, movies, YouTube and all over the web.

Should I choose one for what reason? Everyone lives in their own world and is good at their job. If they were next to me, I would choose Michalakis from Tafaka and buy him ice cream because I think he deserves it.

One day I found at the intersection of Asklipiou and Tsimiski streets, under an orange tree, a doll covered in cement. It was a dirty corner next to the basement. I watched her for a week and then someone took her away. Then I wrote the story “The Gift”. What happened to her next is fiction, but the doll really existed.

zealStory by: Alexandra Scaraki