Vasiliki Sifostratoudaki

What was your favorite book as a child?

How to choose a book? Can I choose a feeling? I loved reading. I had phases where I got to know the authors, as I called them. Not literally, but through the sense of reading more and more of their work. Each book felt like entering a space, a place.

I remember my Shakespeare summer as a young teenager, when the language suddenly became rhythmic and musical. My father, a typographer, gave me access to books from a very early age — I read them, but also watched how they were made.

As a child, I still remember the incredible thrill of finishing the stories of The Famous Five all in a single week.

What was the original reason or motivation why you started writing creatively?

I always wrote in my notebooks — not diaries, but fragments of what I saw, what I felt, what I experienced, where I was.

Later, I was encouraged to write during my studies and invited into writing by artists and poets I admired. Those moments revealed that writing could give meaning to the everyday, even in the most unexpected situations.

What was the most adventurous or thrilling thing you ever did/experienced?

Watching the night sky on an empty beach, swimming with the fish, a deer in the mountains or a fox in the city — I froze when I realized we were there, wishing it would last a little longer.

Meeting and mirroring a sea turtle, the smiles of loved ones and strangers, the surprise in the eyes of an unexpected kind gesture.

I’m not sure how to define adventure or thrill, but I often feel it intensely in tiny everyday encounters, both human and non-human.

Do you listen to music while reading or writing?

No, not really. I usually prefer silence, or the surrounding sounds of where I am to accompany me.