Kay Cicellis Translator & Author

Kay Cicellis (1926–2001) was born to Greek parents in Marseilles, where she spent her first nine years. Having learned French and English in the nursery, she spent her later childhood in Athens and on her father’s native island of Cephalonia. Her first stories, smuggled out of Athens during the Nazi occupation, were published in the British military press when she was a teenager. Her first story collection, The Easy Way, appeared with an introduction by Vita Sackville-West in 1950. Apart from The Way to Colonos, Cicellis published a second story collection, Death of a Town, and two novels, Ten Seconds from Now and No Name in the Street. She spent her later life in Athens, where she and her husband raised two children and opened a restaurant, Balthazar, which remains in business half a century later. Rachel Cusk is the author of Second Place, the Outline trilogy, the memoirs A Life’s Work and Aftermath, and several other works of fiction and nonfiction. She is a Guggenheim Fellow. She lives in Paris.