Xenitia – an Evening with Michalia Arathimos

Xenitia – understandings of home, identity and belonging: an evening with Michalia Arathimos

Join the Randell Cottage Writers Trust for an evening of readings and conversation with the 2020 Creative New Zealand Randell Cottage writer in residence Michalia Arathimos.

What is the meaning of home? For Michalia Arathimos notions of home are inextricably bound up with the notion of xenitia - a feeling common in the Greek diaspora, a feeling of being in exile, or of longing for ‘home’. But the real meaning of xenitia is untranslatable. It is a longing for a home that no longer exists, or which perhaps never existed in the first place.
How does this longing, this loss play out in the life of a writer who is the child of migrants living in a colonised country? And how does she explore that in her work?