“I am under the impression that all of us can recall a certain moment upon which we realized how vulnerable and defenseless we were in the face of this pandemic,” says Gianni Skaragkas. “Regardless of what we had heard of, no matter how many horrible images we had come across from China, there was a specific point in time when we all – driven by different occasions – began to fully grasp the size of the problem.” For the Thessaloniki-raised writer, screenwriter and playwright, this dawning came during his Lady of Ro tour in the USA. In his own words: “I was coming back from LA and I can tell your that over the two prior weeks the scenario of a virus outbreak was on no one’s lips. I was about to spend the next couple of months between the USA and Australia, constantly hopping from one city to another, from one airport to another. During my week’s stay in Athens, the coronavirus threat assessment rose to pandemic status. I was honestly overcome by panic at the thought of my scheduled trips. That was just a few days before Trump and Australia’s prime minister announced a ban on flights, which left me at a complete loss. On one hand, I was afraid, as I could not ask for a suspension of the contract I had signed with the producers. On the other hand, I was aware of how financially detrimental it would be to cancel the tour.”

This abrupt shift of plans and this sudden change in his everyday life triggered unexpected reactions inside him. “For some reason I went off on myself, getting angry at my way of life, at my work, at my moving back and forth in Switzerland and in the USA over the last years,” he explains. “As peculiar as it may sound, I felt for the first time that my privilege of working in various countries was putting me at risk — it was so unfair to feel that way as every sense of fulfillment and achievement had been replaced by a hint of irresponsibility. I can’t let go of this shock and I’m not sure I have got past it, as I am still unable to determine how, and most importantly if, Ι am capable or willing to change my living and working conditions.”

As we speak, Gianni Skaragkas’ new novel, bearing the title Before You Sleep with the Devil, published by Kritiki Editions, has just hit the bookstores. It is a historical police novel, set in Athens, in the early 1930s, against the backdrop of the rebetiko world and the Greek movie industry’s early days, while portraying the country’s struggle to stand on its feet and heal its traumas. The book’s main character is Philotimos Vakhos, a columnist at the newspaper The Athenian News, who finds himself charged with murder and entangled in a murky affair.

At the same time, he has teamed up with the Greek-American director Fay Lellios, as they are jointly co-writing the screenplay of the movie Road Narrows, produced by George Pelecanos and Emma Thomson. The shooting, currently under a temporary hiatus due to the public health measures, will take place in the Peloponnese area and have been re-scheduled for 2021. The film is a family drama that touches upon mother-daughter relationships, the feeling of repatriation, and the second chances we are given in life.

So, what’s the windup for Gianni Skaragkas, in the aftermath of the shock, the upsets and the reevaluations that took place over the last three months? “The quarantine taught me how to plan each day separately and take one thing at a time. I took a conscious decision, shortly before the restrictions were imposed, to spend this time in the company of people that really needed me, and whose life and well-being would benefit from my presence. And so I did, ending up receiving an invitation from the University of Oklahoma’s magazine World Literature Today to include my recording of this experience in its summer issue.

WHO IS HE

A novelist, playwright and screenwriter, writing in both Greek and English, with a career spanning two decades, Gianni Skaragkas is the author of eleven books, published both in Greece and abroad. In 2018, he was awarded the Editors’ Prize in Prose for issue 26 of the Copper Nickel literary journal housed at the University of Colorado, for his short story How to Draw Human Figures. He has also written nine theatrical plays, staged in Greece, in the USA and in Switzerland, among which stand out Prime Numbers, which had its premiere in New York, and Courage, which took the stage in Zurich, in 2017. He is a frequent collaborator of numerous top-notch American literary magazines, while he has worked in the field of television, as a screenwriter in five TV series, as well as in the movie industry. He is not only a Fulbright fellow, but has also received scholarship from the Literarisches Colloquium Berlin. He is the recipient of many honorary distinctions from prestigious institutions and foundations, both in Europe and in the USA, for his work as a writer.