Greek author Dionysis Charitopoulos dies aged 79, publisher Topos announces

Piraeus and the port

Dionysis Charitopoulos was born in 1947 in Piraeus, where he grew up in the city's poorer neighbourhoods and, from a young age, took manual jobs at the port and in the surrounding machine workshops and factories. Kathimerini notes that he abandoned two attempts at university study, one in Athens and one in London, before finishing either. He worked in advertising until 1990, the year NEWS 24/7 reports he gave up all income-earning activity for good. He was married to the journalist Malvina Karali, and NEWS 24/7 reports he married twice and had two sons from his first marriage. Topos said his father came from Mesa Mani and his mother from Mikro Chorio in Evrytania, and that growing up in Piraeus in hard times taught him survival, dignity and a knowledge of people. in.gr adds that he loved Olympiacos until his death, which he regarded as an extension of himself.

Death and the publisher's farewell

Kathimerini dates his death to 8 October and says he died at 79 after a stay in an Attica hospital, where he was being treated for a serious health problem. Topos announced the death on 9 October on Facebook, and its message opens with the lines below.

Dionysis Charitopoulos has died. We write it the way he wanted it: he neither left nor departed, nor anything of the sort.

The publisher described him as self-sufficient, resilient and fearless in life and in writing, and said the house had worked with him since it was founded in 2007. Topos says 12 new titles were published with it in that period and 12 earlier titles were reissued. The message closes with an embrace for his son Kostas and his brother Giannis.

Books and history

His first book appeared in 1976, and Topos says critics and readers praised him while being unable to classify him, calling him unclassifiable and autonomous. Kathimerini dates 525 Infantry Battalion to 1981, a novel that satirised the 1974 mobilisation under the dictatorship and the wider absurdity of social life in Greece. Children of Chelidona, published in 1983, followed one family through war, occupation, resistance, civil war and later decades, and Kathimerini notes that Kostas Vrettakos later adapted it for the cinema. His 2009 biography Aris, the Leader of the Irregulars, published that October, drew objections from critics and historians, according to Kathimerini. NEWS 24/7 reports a 2022 sequel, The Irregulars, which gathered material from 25 years of research and gave separate attention to people and events that the shadow of the leader had covered.

Writing as a way of life

In a 2016 conversation with Vima, he said writing had saved him from a life he might otherwise have led. He put it this way:

Writing literally saved me. It did great damage to my personal life, but it kept me from following other paths.

Asked in 2008 by what right he wrote history, he answered:

To write, you don't need a permit, you write whatever you want.

He also said a writer is always against the age he lives in, whatever that age is, and that a writer must point out what the other person does not yet see. He returned to Piraeus in his writing not out of nostalgia, he said, but to understand the world around him and the man he became afterwards.