Ioulia Iatridi

Ioulia Iatridi (1914 - 1996). Ioulia Iatridi was born in Athens, the daughter of Joseph Boustindoui, a Spanish conductor who served as the director of the Athens State Orchestra for many years. She studied Spanish language and literature at the University of Barcelona and violin at the Athens Conservatory. She worked as a Spanish teacher at the Foreign Language Teaching Center of the University of Athens and as a violin instructor at the Conservatory of the Piraeus Association for fifteen years, while also pursuing a career as a soloist in European orchestras. She made her literary debut around 1950 with short story publications in the magazine Nea Estia. Two years later, she was awarded the First Prize in the International Short Story Competition of the New York Herald Tribune newspaper for her story All Night Together (published under the title The Night of Michalis) and published the book Three Faces (three novellas). She was also honored with the Kostas Ouranis Award (1959 for the novel Rider in the Wind), the State Prize for Prose (1964 for the novel The Stone Lions), the First State Prize for Biographical Novel (1978 for the biographical novel of Lope de Vega titled Pyrigonos), and the Mathews Award (1995 for her entire body of work). She was also involved in literary and theatrical translation (Cervantes, Lope de Vega, Valle-Inclán, Tirso de Molina, Miguel de Unamuno, Federico García Lorca, etc.) and adaptations of literary works for radio and television (Kafka, Chekhov, Giraudoux, etc.). She collaborated with the magazine Efthyni, where she focused on the issue of the Greek language in the last years of her life. She served as vice president of the National Society of Greek Writers and the Society of Literary Translators, as well as a member of the PEN Club and the Society of Greek Playwrights. She passed away in Athens. The literary work of Ioulia Iatridi is dominated by themes of the human struggle to reconcile with oneself and the absurdity of mortal life, and to communicate with others. For more biographical details on Ioulia Iatridi, see Angelos Afroudakis, "Ioulia Iatridi," Post-war Prose; From the War of '40 to the Dictatorship of '67, Vol. III, pp. 116-125. Athens, Sokolis, 1988 and Tasos N. Petres, "Iatridi Ioulia," Great Encyclopedia of Modern Greek Literature 7. Athens, Haris Patsis, n.d. (Source: Archive of Greek Writers, EKEBI).