Elena Penga

Elena Penga (Greek: ‘Ελενα Πέγκα ) is a Greek playwright, fiction writer and stage director. Born in Thessaloniki, she studied Theater and Philosophy at Wesleyan University and Screen and Theater Writing at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. Her most recent book Tight Belts and Other Skin (Agra, 2012) has been translated into Swedish and English as prose poetry. She is also one of the co-authors of the screenplay for Lakis Papastathis’ award-winning film about the phenomenal Greek short-story writer Giorgios Vizyenos, His Only Journey in His Life.

Biography

Penga was born in Thessaloniki. She studied in the United States, theater and philosophy at Wesleyan University, and scriptwriting at the University of Southern California. She moved back to Greece in the 1990s.

Style and themes

Penga's work has been described as dark and poetic by Cosmopoliti. Penga writes about the political in the everyday and the violent effects of large events on the individual.  Her theatre tackles familiar themes in modern forms in order to investigate deeper issues of the human existence, by capturing them inside their dull, every day, and at the same time, metaphysical, clearly philosophical dimension.  Her theatre is contemporary Greek and also a theatre of the world.

Karen Van Dyke in her intro of Penga in the anthology Austerity Measures- The New Greek Poetry, says: East Village punk naïveté meets Margarita Karapanou’s wise child from Kassandra and the Wolf in Elena Penga’s theatrical and poetical writing alike.

David Wallace of The New Yorker, in his review of the same anthology writes:

Greece’s debt is a different kind of catastrophe, one that occurs in slow motion: its mechanisms are abstract and impersonal, although the consequences are very real for those who rely on government institutions. These strictures insinuate themselves into the ambience of everyday life and language, something that poets can observe with careful attention. Here, for instance, is the poet Elena Penga (in Van Dyck’s translation) describing a menace in plain sight:  

The cherry trees in the neighbor’s yard haven’t had fruit for years. Four men enter carrying sticks. They enter the neighbor’s yard along with the rain. They’ve come to discipline the trees and chop them down if they don’t blossom. I watch the men hit the trees. I watch the rain hit the men.

A few unadorned sentences weave together several ideas: the sense of failed growth, the coercion that upholds the rule of efficiency, the passivity of the onlooker. Are the men from the government or from a corporation? It seems appropriate that we don’t know. This ordinary violence doesn’t need to be spelled out, it seems to say—it’s right in front of us if we’re merely observant enough to record it.

Plays

Most of her plays have been published in Greek.

• Πορνοστάρ – Η αόρατη βιομηχανία του σεξ, (Pornstar: The Invisible Sex Industry) 2018. Produced by the Athens and Epidavros Festival in 2018.
• Γυναίκα και Λύκος - Woman and Wolf, 2014. Presented at the Municipal Theater of Peireus.
• Narcissus, 2011
• Phaedra Or Alcestis- Love Stories, 2007. Presented at the European Cultural Center of Delphi.
• Who are our new friends?,  2006. Produced at New Friends by the National Theater of Northern Greece.
• Nelly’s takes her dog out for a walk, 2003
• When the Go-Go Dancers dance, 2002
• 3-0-1 TRANSPORTS, 2000
• Emperor’s New Clothes, based on Andersen’s fairytale, 1999
• Waltz Excitation, 1998
• Kaethe Kollwitz presents a brief history of modern art, 1995
• Gorky’s Wife, 1995
• A king listens, based on a short story by Italo Calvino, 1994
• The Greek Alien & Poisons of the Sea, 1993
• 6 Jealous Numbers, based on Othello by Shakespeare,1992
• Don Surrealism, one-act, 1991

Fiction

2011

ΣΦΙΧΤΕΣ ΖΩΝΕΣ ΚΑΙ ΑΛΛΑ ΔΕΡΜΑΤΑ (TIGHT BELTS AND OTHER SKINS), a novella (written in Greek) published by Agra Publications. (2012 Literary Award of the Kostas and Eleni Ouranis Foundation)

1997

ΣΚΟΥΩΣ - ΣΤΙΓΜΕΣ ΑΝΤΡΙΚΕΣ ΚΑΙ ΓΥΝΑΙΚΕΙΕΣ (SQUΑSH - MOMENTS MALE AND FEMALE), a novella (written in Greek) published by Agra Publications.

Selections have been translated into Swedish and German, and published in literary magazines.

1986

ΑΥΤΗ ΘΕΡΙΝΗ (SHE SUMMER LIKE), a novella (written in Greek) published by Agra Publications.

Works translated to English

AUSTERITY MEASURES Anthology of contemporary Greek poetry translated and compiled by Karen Van Dyck (includes short prose from her collection Tight Belts and Other Skin), published by Penguin, 2016

AUSTERITY MEASURES: THE NEW GREEK POETRY, also published by New York Review of Books, 2017.

Her short story The Untrodden (Το Αβατον) has been selected at BEST EUROPEAN FICTION 2017(official entry for Greece), published by Dalkey Archive Press, in the fall of 2016.

The short story originally written in Greek has been published in an English translation by Karen Van Dyck.

THE PENGUIN BOOK OF THE PROSE. POEM- From Baudellaire to Anne Carson - anthology that includes her - Published by Penguin, UK, 2018

References

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