Xenitia – Understandings of Home, Identity and Belonging
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Join us for an evening of readings and conversation with the 2020 Creative New Zealand Randell Cottage writer in residence Michalia Arathimos.
Yearning for a lost home
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?
About the speaker
Michalia Arathatimos is a Wellington-born writer of Greek descent and writer in residence at the Randell Cottage and working on ‘Cartographia’, a novel exploring questions of home and identity.
Her first novel ‘Aukati’ was published in 2017 by Wellington’s Mākaro Press. She holds a PhD in Creative Writing from Victoria University’s IIML and is currently fiction reviewer for the Melbourne’s ‘Overland Magazine’.
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