Greek author Dionysis Charitopoulos, whose biography of resistance leader Aris Velouchiotis and fictionalised memoir of the post-junta years earned him a devoted readership, has died at the age of 79.
Charitopoulos had been in hospital in Attica in recent weeks, battling a serious health problem.
From the Piraeus docks to the page
Born in Piraeus in 1947, Charitopoulos grew up working a string of manual jobs at the port and in the machine shops that surrounded it.
He made two early attempts at university study, first in Athens and then in London, but abandoned both. Until 1990 he worked in advertising.
His best-known books include his biography of Aris Velouchiotis, Aris, o Archigos ton Ataktōn (“Aris, Leader of the Irregulars”), and his novelistic autobiography Erotes sti Metapolitefsi (“Love Affairs in the Metapolitefsi”).
His final book, Oi Ataktoi (Prosopa kai Gegonota), was published in 2022.
Charitopoulos was married to the journalist Malvina Karali.
“A category of his own”
His publisher, Topos Books, paid tribute to the writer in a statement that pointedly avoided the usual euphemisms.
“Dionysis Charitopoulos has died. We write it the way he wanted it, not ‘he left us’, not ‘he departed’, nor anything of the sort,” the publisher said, describing him as frugal, resilient and a man of his word “in his life and in his writing”.
Topos noted that he was a Piraeus native through and through, with roots in Mesa Mani on his father’s side and in Mikro Chorio, in the mountains of Evrytania, on his mother’s.
According to the statement, Charitopoulos always said he was grateful to have lived through tough times in Piraeus, where the port and its people gave him a crash course in survival, dignity and understanding human nature while he worked hard manual jobs from a young age.
From his first book in 1976, the publisher said, he won praise from critics and, above all, from readers, who nonetheless found him impossible to pigeonhole.
“Unclassifiable, unsortable, independent” are some of the words that followed him, Topos said. He belonged to no literary school, movement or clique, and did not follow the dictates of his era.
“He was a category of his own. A genuinely non-conformist soul whose writing, in each of his 24 books, exudes the unrivalled charm of the authentic and almost always the deeply lived,” the statement read.
Charitopoulos had worked with Topos since the publishing house was founded in 2007. Over that time it released 12 new titles by him and reissued 12 more, his entire earlier body of work.
A final dance
In a moving farewell, the publisher’s staff said they were bidding him goodbye like a silent circle dance, picturing him dancing one last time to the only song he ever danced to, Vassilis Tsitsanis’s “Isos Avrio” (“Maybe Tomorrow”).
They also shared, as his legacy, the words he chose to open his last book:
“I will always be with the barefoot, outside the Winter Palace, even if they are worse than those inside, because they have right on their side.”
Topos extended its condolences to his son, Kostas, and his brother, Giannis.
Source: Kathimerini
