CV

Nicos Panayotopoulos was born in Athens in 1963.

He studied engineering, but at the same time took drama courses at the Hellenic-American Union. Initially, he worked as an arts journalist for newspapers, magazines and television. Since 1992 he makes a living as a novelist and screenwriter.

He has been teaching screenwriting in several Film Schools, seminars and workshops, and, lately, at the Film Department of the School of Fine Arts at AUTH. Since 2007 he is a senior trainer at the MFI script2film workshops.

He has written screenplays for short films, TV series and feature films. In 1996 he won the best screenplay award for Truants (dir. by N. Grammatikos), at the Thessaloniki Film Festival. In 2000 he won the first prize in a screenwriting competition with his screenplay False Alarm, which was produced in 2006 (dir. by K. Evangelakou). He co-wrote The King and The Wake (2002, 2005, dir. by N. Grammatikos), My brother and I, (1998, dir. by A Kokkinos), and Totally Married (2003, dir. by D. Indares) among others.

He has written a collection of short stories, “The Guilt of Materials” (Polis ed. 1997), for which he was awarded the Maria Ralli Award for first appearing writers, and four novels: “Ziggy from Marfan – The Diary of an Alien” (Polis ed. 1998), “The Gene of doubt” (Polis ed. 1999),“Icon” (Polis ed. 2003) -the later was shortlisted for the National Novel Award-, and “The children of Cain” (Metaixmio publ. 2011).

Ziggy is translated in Italian (Polvere di stelle, Crocetti ed.), Icon is translated in French (Saint-Homme, ed. Gallimard) and German (Heiligmacher, Reclam Verlag), and the Gene is translated in French (Le Gene du doute, ed. Gallimard), German (Die Erfindung des zweifels, Reclam Verlag), Italian (Il gene del dubbio, Ponte Alle Grazie ed.), Slovenian, Serbian and Chinese and is currently being translated in Portuguese.

He has translated into Greek Andrew Crumey’s “Mr. Mee”, Philip Roth’s “The professor of desire”, and Jean Echenoz’s “Jérôme Lindon”.