Engineer, geographer and environmentalal planner, Dr. Michalis Modinos was born in Athens in 1950. He has lived and worked in several countries on behalf of international agencies and organisations. He is an environmental activist, editor of the monthly review New Ecology, and the author of numerous publications on environmental and development issues. He ran for mayor in Athens at the municipal elections of 1990 as head of the Green List. He was the founder and acted as President of the National Agency for the Environment and Sustainable Development. He was the editor in chief of the greek edition of The State of the Planet, in collaboration with the WorldWatch Institute. He has taught in numerous academic institutions, and from 1998 to 2010 has been coordinating the “Summer Ecological University”.
He has published the following novels: Golden Coast (2005), The Great Abbai (2007), Homecoming (2009), The Raft (2011), Wild West: a love story (2013), Last Exit: Stymfalia (2014), Equatoria (2016) The Network (2018), and Paraguay [2020] having won several literary prizes and distinctions, among them the National Book Award, the Prize of the Greek Academy for Fiction and the Prize of the “Literature Review”, while he was nominated for the European Prize for Literature.
His non -fiction works include among others: Myths of Development in the Tropics (1986); From Eden to Purgatory (1988); Topographies (1990); Where is the World Heading to? (1992); The Development Game (1993); The Archaeology of Development: Green Perspectives (1996); The Eco-geography of the Mediterranean (2001); The Pathways of Sustainable Development (2003); Globalization and the Environment (2004).
He acted as a member of the administrative board of the Hellenic Society of Authors. Since 2008 he has been writing regularly book reviews and literary criticism for the daily press and several publications.
