Blood is the word. Blood in every sense. Gjak: Tales of Blood, written by Dimosthenis Papamarkos, was a massive success on publication in 2014. It won the prestigious Academy of Athens award and has become one of the most widely discussed works of 21st-century Greek literature.

Now it has found its perfect voice in English in the 2026 translation by Siân Valvis, a British-Greek literary translator working across Greek, Russian, French and Portuguese.

With her translation of Gjak, Valvis has now also successfully navigated the language and ethos of the Arvanite villages. The Arvanites are a bilingual group, descendants of migrants from Albania in the 13th to 16th centuries who settled in central and southern Greece. Their language, Arvanitic, is an Albanian dialect seasoned with loans from other languages and dialects.

Gjak was written in a dialect blending elements of Arvanitic into Greek. Valvis’s English translation is startling: a vivid, at times raw, at times highly lyrical text.

As an expert in the trauma of 20th-century Greek warfare, the weight of cultural memory and the complex historical identity of the Arvanite people, seldom have I read a work that exudes so much linguistic and cultural ruggedness and sensitivity all at once. I came away with a sense of uneasy familiarity and I am sure you will too, for there is no place........

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