Rosita Sokou

Rosita Sokou is a Greek journalist, author, playwright, translator. Her father, Georgios Sokos, was a journalist, editor and playwright from Aitoliko who died at the age of 44, just before the war. Her mother Titika Michailidou came from Smyrna. Rosita-Maria-Zoe (her full name)was born in Athens, Greece, on September 9th, 1923. She graduated from the Arsakeio School in Psychiko. During the war and occupation she perfected her French and English. She attended the School of Fine Arts, was a pupil of painter [[Yannis Tsarouchis]] and also attended the Vassilis Rotas Drama School, while working from a tender age as a translator and a foreign language teacher. After the end of the German Occupation and Civil War, in 1947, she studied 20th century literature in Oxford. One of the first women journalists in Greece, she started her career as a film critic in 1946, writing in newspapers such as Vradini, Kathimerini, Acropolis, Ethnos, Apoghevmatini and the English-language Athens News, as well as for numerous magazines and regularly attended film festivals in Cannes, Venice, Thessaloniki etc. From the 70s, she expanded to theatre criticism and various other columns. After her marriage to Italian journalist and author Manlio Maradei, she lived in Rome, Italy, from 1957 to 1961, but then came back to live in Greece with her daughter. In 1967, after the onset of the military dictatorship, editor Eleni Vlahou closed her media (the "Kathimerini" newspaper and "Eikones" magazine), in protest against the suppressed freedom of the press, and flew to London. Rosita was left jobless, and with a small child to provide for. Nevertheless she was one of the only two people (the other one was Freddie Germanos) who refused to sew Vlahou and ask for damages - for this she faced the disciplinary board of the Journalists' Union and threatened to be expelled from the Union. She held fast: accepting to sign the lawsuit meant to recognize that Vlahou's claim (that it was impossible to have press worthy of its name in Greece) was unsubstantial. These were difficult years, in which she worked editing encyclopedias, translating, and finally ended up working for the Botsis newspapers, Acropolis and Apoghevmatini. At the end of the 8-year dictatorship, Eleni Vlahou came back to Greece and opened "Kathimerini" again, and Rosita collaborated sporadically under the pseudonym of Irene Stavrou. During the period 1977-1983 she became a celebrity thanks to the TV show "Na I Efkeria" ("Here's your chance", a Greek version of "Opportunity knocks"), where she was a member of the panel examining the candidates. These were the early days of TV, and the audience response was unprecedented. In 1992-93 she hosted her own TV show at Νew Channel. She has translated many books - among others [Aldous Huxley], [Ingmar Bergman], [Isaac Asimov] and Stanisław Lem - reflecting her own tastes and interests, as well as comics such as the "Corto Maltese" series by Hugo Pratt. She has translated, edited and updated the two-volume "Cinema" encyclopedia by Georges Charensol, adding a whole new chapter on Greek cinema. Since 1974 she started her deeper involvement with theatre, writing the play The Portrait of Dorian Grey (based on Oscar Wilde's novella), and adapting Georg Büchner's ''Lenz'' for the Dimitri Potamitis' Experimental Theatre. Later on, she translated Sam Shepard's 'Shock' and Edward Albee's 'Sea View' for Yorgos' Messalas. Together with her daughter, she translated Manjula Padmanabhan's 'Harvest' which was awarded 1st prize at the Onassis International Theatre Competition in 1998 and Jean Anouilh's 'Jesabel' for Jenny Roussea's troupe in 1999. She has been given the medal "Chevalier de l' Ordre des Arts et des Lettres" for her services to cinema by the French government (1986), and awarded by the Botsis Foundation (1988) for her offer to Greek journalism.