On Friday 6 November, for the first time, a university in Greece will hold an event devoted to Greek Australian literature.[1] The English department at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki is hosting an online symposium called Greek Australians Write Back! Voices of Change. Christos Tsiolkas is the guest of honour, with nine other writers, academics and journalists from our community. The organiser, Theodora Patrona, says: “We are the only ones teaching Australian literature in Greece, as far as I know.”[1]
Reading the list of speakers, I found myself asking a question I usually avoid.
The silly question
My generation gets asked, in many guises, whether we are Greek Australians or Australian Greeks. I think that’s a silly question. We’re both, and proud of both parts of our make-up.
We love Australia: the land we were born in or grew up in, where we studied and worked, where we made our families, where our kids grew up and in turn had their families and careers. It is without a doubt one of the best countries for working families.
But we also love our Greek culture: the rich heritage and history, the deep community connection, and the language and music that carry subtleties only that language can encode. And that indescribable φιλότιμο that so defines what it means to be Greek. Neither side takes precedence over the other.
Am I a Greek writer?
Asking whether I’m a Greek Australian writer is just another form of the same question.
I’m a retired software engineer who now spends a lot of time writing. I write about things that interest me and that I have some experience with: software, estimates, AI, how organisations make decisions. Because of the part of me that is Greek, and because I grew up as the son of an immigrant in Australia and now spend a good part of each year in Greece, I write about that too.
I don’t know if that makes me a Greek writer. I suspect the honest answer is the same as before: both, and neither takes precedence.
Reading in two languages
I can read Greek well, but I’ve read so much more in English that I’m much slower with Greek texts. That’s probably true of many of us, and it’s one reason a symposium like this matters. Tsiolkas, for one, writes in English, about lives lived between the two countries.
I’ve read some Tsiolkas, and I really enjoyed The Slap. It stripped away the political correctness of contemporary suburban Australian life and exposed the real tensions around race, ethnicity and gender in 21st-century Australia. No relation to my own slap on the back of the head earlier this week.
Writing back
What I like most is the direction. For a long time the diaspora has been asked to preserve what it brought with it. Now a Greek university is reading what the diaspora wrote, and what it made of the inheritance.
I won’t be in Greece until next year, so I’ll miss it. If I were there, I’d probably have gone. It’s online, though, and it runs from 9am to 3pm Greek time, which is 6pm to midnight in Melbourne. Preregistration is now open.
And a question for you: which Greek Australian writers would you add to the list?
[1] Helen Vrontis, “Greek Australian writers take centre stage at landmark Thessaloniki university symposium”, Neos Kosmos, 30 October 2026.