A Salon with author Amanda Michalopoulou. Jointly hosted by the Consulates General of Germany and Greece in New York on Thursday, November 3,2022.

The Consul General of Germany in New York, David Gill, along with the Consul General of Greece in New York, Dinos Konstantinou had the pleasure of hosting a Salon with the Greek novelist Amanda Michalopoulou. The event took place at the Residence of the German Consulon November 3,2022.The two Consuls gave a warm welcome to their guests. The evening was mostly dedicated to the author’s book “Why I Killed My Best Friend”.

In Amanda Michalopoulou's novel “Why I Killed My Best Friend”, from which she read, a young girl named Maria is lifted from her beloved Africa and relocated to her native Greece. She struggles with the transition,and just as she resigns herself to misery, Anna arrives. Though Anna's refined, Parisian upbringing is the exact opposite of Maria's, the two girls instantly bond over their common foreignness, becoming inseparable in their relationship as each other's best friend, but also as each other's fiercest competition-be it in relation to boys, talents, future aspirations, or political beliefs.

From Maria and Anna's gradeschool days in 70s, post-dictatorship Greece, to their adult lives in the present, Michalopoulou charts the ups, downs, and fallings-out of the powerful self-destructive bond only true best friends can have. Simply and beautifully written, Why I Killed My Best Friend is a novel that ultimately compares and explores friendship as a political system of totalitarianism and democracy.

Amanda Michalopolou's latest book “Why I Killed My Best Friend”. uses the backdrop of Greek politics, radical protests, and the art world to explore the dangers and joys that come with as the narrator puts it, 'odiodsamato,' which translates roughly as 'frienemies.'"

The evening closed with an open discussion between the writer and her New York fans attending the Salon.

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About Amanda Michalopoulou

Amanda was born in Athens in 1966. She studied French Literature in Athens and Journalism in Paris. She has worked as a columnist for Kathimerini Daily, before starting to write novels and short-stories. She has been awarded Greek and International Literature Awards (The Diavazo Novel Prize, The Prize of Academy of Athens, The International Literature Prize by National Endowment for the Arts, USA, the Catalan Liberis Liber Prize etc). Her fiction has been translated into sixteen languages. She is currently a creative writing professor with various institutions.