Bio:Kay Cicellis

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Kay Cicellis, or Kaiē Tsitselē when writing in Greek, was born in Marseille, France of Greek parents in 1926. Her family returned to Greece in 1936, where she learned Greek and spent most of her life. She attended the American College in Athens and spent the World War II years in her father's home island of Cephalonia. She traveled extensively to Britain, Italy, Pakistan, Irak, Lebanon and Nigeria and spent many years abroad. She married Nikos Paleologos in 1957. In 1964 she settled permanently in Athens, where in addition to her literary work, she also worked for radio. For much of her career, she wrote in English—the result of a childhood spent in Marseille among English and French-speakers. Greece's premier literary translator, it was only after publishing several works in English and translating works from Greek into English that she started to experiment with writing in Greek. She distinguished herself as a writer both in Greek and English. Her fiction has been translated into English, Greek, French, German, Portugese, and Spanish. The Dance of the Hours (Athens: Agra Publications, 1998), a collection of short stories, won the Greek State Prize in 1999.

An extensive biography of her is included in Greece and Britain since 1945, ed. by David Wills, Cambridge Scholars: 2010, chapter 2: "Kay Cicellis: The Unresolved Dilemma of the Bilingual Writer", by Peter Mackridge.

Her papers are held at Princeton Library.