Kay Cicellis was born in Marseilles in 1926, of Greek parents. In 1936 she came to Greece and learnt Greek. She went to school at the American College in Athens. During the Nazi occupation she was in Cephalonia (1941-1946), the native island of her father. She subsequently travelled to Britain, Italy, Pakistan, Irak, Lebanon and Nigeria. She married in 1957. In 1964 she settled permanently in Athens.
Apart from her novel writing, she worked for radio and as a translator from Greek into English. A number of her short stories have been published in English: The Road to Kolonos (Ermis, 1979), The Lost Floor (Kedros, 1984), and The Dance of Hours (Agra, 1998 - Greek State Short Story Award).
She has published five books in the States, the UK, France, Germany (translated by Heinrich Boll), Spain, Japan and Brazil.

She has translated Greek works
by Tsirkas, Lorentzatos, Koumandareas, Abatzoglou, Vlachou and Rhea Galanaki,
into English.

She died in June 2001.
 
KAY CICELLIS

THE DANCE OF THE HOURS

SHORT STORIES (160 pages, 17.5X12 cm.)
 

The Dance of the Hours contains 15 short stories on the subject of memory, time and age written by a distinguished novelist and translator of Greek literary works into English. Her roots lie in European literature and 20th-century Modernism.
"How strange: as I write in Greek, after so many years of serving the English language - the first language
I knew, in a city of the Greek diaspora -, as I write in Greek hesitantly, apprehensively I could say, towards the end of my life, I see that I write very differently.
I seem to come up against other traps, other points of resistance, other exigencies, but other charms as well."

In 1999, The Dance of the Hours was awarded the Greek State Prize for the Short Story.