Aglaia Blioumi was born in Stuttgart to Greek immigrant parents. She is a graduate of the Department of German Language and Literature at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (AUTH) and holds a PhD in German Philology from the Free University of Berlin. She currently serves as a permanent assistant professor in the Department of German Philology at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens (NKUA). She has taught at various universities, including the University of Berlin, the Hellenic Open University (in the "Creative Writing" program), and this winter semester, she is teaching "Semiotics of Migrant Literature" at AUTH. She has published monographs, edited volumes, and studies on German literature, and her monograph "The Foreign Gaze in Literature: Intercultural Approaches in the Works of Herta Müller" is forthcoming from University Studio Press.

She has published German-language poems in German editions, while her novel "Farewell to Stuttgart, Astyanax" is in Greek and her first novel.

Note on Literary Genre: According to my research, this is likely the first novel by a second-generation German immigrant written in Greek. As a result, it does not solely focus on the first generation of immigrants and consequently on issues of exile, nostalgia, economic hardship, and the misery resulting from migration. Instead, it emphasizes the positive consequences of migration, such as bilingualism, Greek-German relations, and particularly their cultural interactions, hybrid identities, and the transcendence of national history by projecting a common European (Greek-German) memory. The idea is that due to the phenomenon of migration, history is not written by each nation separately; there is no longer only national history. Since the migration phenomenon described in the book is a European phenomenon, a common European history has been created.

Culture: This means that a common European culture has also been created, a culture formed from the interactions between Greeks and Germans (and with other peoples). Examples, among others:

Themes: Hybrid Identities: From the chapter "Hybrid Cymbals": "We are hybrids, you know?" sighed Sevgi, whose father had worked for twenty years in German coal mines before they returned to Adana. "We have codes from one culture, we have codes from the other. Many times we recognize them, and other times they get tangled and interwoven, so we no longer know which code belongs where. We are hybrids, you know?" Sevgi would remind her almost every time they met" (p. 326).

This is a rather rare literary theme, given that hybrid identities usually appear in the second generation of immigrants, and in Greek literature, second-generation immigrant literature is almost unknown.