Elena Penga

Elena Penga (Greek: ‘Ελενα Πέγκα ) is a Greek playwright, fiction writer, and stage director. Her book Tight Belts and Other Skin (Agra, 2012) was translated into Swedish and English. She is one of the co-authors of the screenplay for Lakis Papastathis His Only Journey in HIs Life, an award-winning film about the Greek short-story writer Giorgios Vizyenos.

She was born in Thessaloniki. She traveled to the United States for her undergraduate education, and earned a bachelor's degree in philosophy and theater at Wesleyan University. She completed her master's degree in scriptwriting at the University of Southern California. She returned to Greece in the early 1990s.

Penga's work was described as dark and poetic by Cosmopoliti. Penga writes about the everyday aspects of politics and explores how individuals feel the repercussions of violence on a large scale. Her dramatic writing investigates issues of human existence, and explores the metaphysical and philosophical dimensions that present themselves in the dull, sometimes mundane lives of ordinary people. Her writing reflects contemporary Greek influences.

David Wallace of The New Yorker, in his review of the anthology Austerity Measures- The New Greek Poetry, writes:

Greece’s debt is a different kind of catastrophe, one that occurs in slow motion: its mechanisms are abstract and impersonal, although the consequences are very real for those who rely on government institutions. These strictures insinuate themselves into the ambience of everyday life and language, something that poets can observe with careful attention. Here, for instance, is the poet Elena Penga (in Van Dyck’s translation) describing a menace in plain sight:  

The cherry trees in the neighbor’s yard haven’t had fruit for years. Four men enter carrying sticks. They enter the neighbor’s yard along with the rain. They’ve come to discipline the trees and chop them down if they don’t blossom. I watch the men hit the trees. I watch the rain hit the men.

A few unadorned sentences weave together several ideas: the sense of failed growth, the coercion that upholds the rule of efficiency, the passivity of the onlooker. Are the men from the government or from a corporation? It seems appropriate that we don’t know. This ordinary violence doesn’t need to be spelled out, it seems to say—it’s right in front of us if we’re merely observant enough to record it.

Most of her plays were published in Greek.

• Πορνοστάρ – Η αόρατη βιομηχανία του σεξ, (Pornstar: The Invisible Sex Industry) 2018.Produced by the Athens and Epidavros Festival in 2018.
• Γυναίκα και Λύκος - Woman and Wolf, 2014.Presented at the Municipal Theater of Peireus.
• Narcissus, 2011
• Phaedra Or Alcestis- Love Stories, 2007.Presented at the European Cultural Center of Delphi.
• Who are our new friends?,  2006.Produced at New Friends by the National Theater of Northern Greece.
• Nelly’s takes her dog out for a walk, 2003
• When the Go-Go Dancers dance, 2002
• 3-0-1 TRANSPORTS, 2000
• Emperor’s New Clothes, based on Andersen’s fairytale, 1999
• Waltz Excitation, 1998
• Kaethe Kollwitz presents a brief history of modern art, 1995
• Gorky’s Wife, 1995
• A king listens, based on a short story by Italo Calvino, 1994
• The Greek Alien & Poisons of the Sea, 1993
• 6 Jealous Numbers, based on Othello by Shakespeare,1992
• Don Surrealism, one-act, 1991

• ΣΦΙΧΤΕΣ ΖΩΝΕΣ ΚΑΙ ΑΛΛΑ ΔΕΡΜΑΤΑ (Tight Belts and Other Skins), a novella (Greek, 2011) published by Agra Publications. (2012 Literary Award of the Kostas and Eleni Ouranis Foundation)
• ΣΚΟΥΩΣ - ΣΤΙΓΜΕΣ ΑΝΤΡΙΚΕΣ ΚΑΙ ΓΥΝΑΙΚΕΙΕΣ (Squash - Moments Male and Female), a novella (Greek 1997) published by Agra Publications. Selections have been translated into Swedish and German, and published in literary magazines.
• ΑΥΤΗ ΘΕΡΙΝΗ (She Summer Like), a novella (Greek 1986) published by Agra Publications.

• Austerity Measures Anthology of contemporary Greek poetry translated and compiled by Karen Van Dyck (includes short prose from her collection Tight Belts and Other Skin), published by Penguin, 2016

• Austerity Measures: The New Greek Poetry, also published by New York Review of Books, 2017
• The Penguin Book of The Prose Poem - From Baudelaire to Anne Carson - anthology that includes her - Published by Penguin, UK, 2018

• Best European Fiction (2017) "The Untrodden" (Το Αβατον) (official entry for Greece), published by Dalkey Archive Press, in the fall of 2016. The short story originally written in Greek was translated by Karen Van Dyck.