Rhea (Rea) Galanaki was born in Heraklion, Crete. She studied History and Archeology in Athens. She has published novels, short stories, poems and essays. She is a founding member of the Society of Writers.
For her entire work, she received the 2023 Grand Prize for Letters.
For her contribution to letters and the arts, she was honored by the President of the Republic, Katerina Sakellaropoulou, with the Gold Cross of the Order of Ephesus (2022).
She has been honored twice with the State Prize (Novel 1999 and Short Story 2005). She has also been honored with the Costa and Eleni Ourani Prose Prize of the Academy of Athens (2003), the “Nikos Kazantzakis” Prize of the Municipality of Heraklion, Crete (1987) and the Readers’ Prize of the National Book Center (2006).
Her novel The Extreme Humiliation won the Balkanika Literary Award, the international distinction of the Balkan countries (2019). The same book, in its French edition, was nominated for the Prix Méditerranée Étranger (2017).
Her novel ”The Life of Ismail Ferik Pasha” is the first Greek novel to be included by UNESCO in the “UNESCO Collection of Representative Works” (1994), while ”Helen or Nobody” claimed the European Award “Excellence” entering the final three candidates projects (1999).
Her works have been translated into seventeen languages: English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Dutch, Czech, Bulgarian, Swedish, Lithuanian, Turkish, Arabic, Chinese, Hebrew, Albanian, Catalan and Ukrainian.
