Alki Zei

Alki Zei was born in Athens on 15 December 1923 and spent much of her childhood on Samos, in her grandparents' house, the island that became the setting of her most famous book. Back in Athens as a teenager she wrote puppet-theatre plays and studied at the drama school of the Athens Conservatory, where she met her lifelong friend, the novelist Zorz Sari. During the German occupation she joined the left-wing resistance youth, and in 1945 she married the playwright Giorgos Sevastikoglou.

After the Greek civil war the couple, like thousands of left-wing Greeks, could not stay in Greece. From 1954 to 1964 they lived in Tashkent, in Soviet Uzbekistan, where Zei studied at the Moscow film institute and their two children were born. They returned to Athens in 1964, but the military coup of 1967 drove them abroad again, this time to Paris, where they stayed until the dictatorship fell in 1974.

Her first novel, Wildcat under Glass, was published in 1963, when she was forty. From then on she wrote steadily for children and, later, for adults, and became the best-loved children's author in Greece, invited to schools all over the country. She died in Athens on 27 February 2020, aged 96, and her funeral was attended by the children's authors, actors and politicians of a whole generation.

Το καπλάνι της βιτρίνας (Wildcat under Glass, 1963) is narrated by Melia, a girl of eight on Samos in 1936. In her grandfather's sitting room stands a stuffed wildcat in a glass case; her cousin Nikos tells the sisters stories about it, and when General Metaxas seizes power in August 1936 the family splits between those who cheer and those, like Nikos, who have to hide. Children learn what a dictatorship is through small things: a school uniform, a banned book, a neighbour who informs. Ο μεγάλος περίπατος του Πέτρου (Petros' War, 1971) does the same for the occupation: Petros is nine when the Italians invade in October 1940, and over four years of hunger in Athens he grows from a boy with a tortoise into a member of the resistance.

Κοντά στις ράγες (Near the Rails, 1977) follows a Greek girl whose family lives in Tashkent, drawn from Zei's own exile, and Ο θείος Πλάτων (Uncle Platon, 1975) is a comic story for younger readers. In 1987 she published her first novel for adults, Η αρραβωνιαστικιά του Αχιλλέα (Achilles' Fiancée), the story of a woman who follows her resistance-fighter husband through the civil war, exile in Tashkent and Paris, which many consider her masterpiece. Late in life she kept writing for children, with Η μωβ ομπρέλα (The Purple Umbrella, 1995) and Η Κωνσταντίνα και οι αράχνες της (Constantina and her Spiders, 2002), a novel about a teenager and drugs, and in 2013 she published a memoir, Με μολύβι Φάμπερ νούμερο δύο (With a Faber Pencil Number Two). Her style is plain, fast and funny, always from the child's height, and never talks down.

Wildcat under Glass and Petros' War are standard reading in Greek primary and junior-secondary school; most Greeks under seventy read at least one of them as children, and the stuffed wildcat in its glass case is a shared childhood memory. Both books have been translated into many languages, and the American editions won the Mildred L. Batchelder Award for translated children's books (1970 and 1974), which brought Greek children's literature to readers abroad. A learner can read the opening chapters of Το καπλάνι της βιτρίνας with a dictionary at A2, as the sentences are short and the vocabulary is everyday. Her adult novel Achilles' Fiancée is read just as widely, and all her books remain in print; a Greek bookshop's children's shelf almost always has a row of them.

• She published her first novel at forty, after years of writing puppet-theatre plays and living in exile.
• Her two children were born in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, where she and her husband lived among Greek political refugees from 1954 to 1964.
• The American translation of Wildcat under Glass won the Mildred L. Batchelder Award for the best translated children's book of the year in 1970, and Petros' War won it again in 1974.
• She lived through the Metaxas dictatorship, the occupation, the civil war and the junta, and wrote about every one of them for children.