for the book The King Who Had Too Much of Everything
“A different, interesting story, rich and well written. It succeeds in managing the obsessions of its protagonist which cause suffering and darkness to the land. At every page you might be listening to music that gives rise to gloom, alienation, terror until, once again, light and hope arrive. A theatrical story or, better still, a story for an opera. The book requires multiple readings, with pauses and spells of silence. It seeks initiated readers while it simultaneously attracts the ‘rest’, the new, hatching readers. In this work, too, Maria Papayanni dares confront the passion for wealth which only brings about pain, destruction, exile and depletion and she does so with a few sparse words, Doric, well aimed and creative. A craftswoman who enchants, while methodically arresting the attention of her old, but also her new reader.”