Panayotis Cacoyannis

Biography

Panayotis had a magical childhood growing up in a small seaside town in Cyprus. After two years as an army conscript (at a time when the island suffered first a military coup and then an invasion), he traveled to Britain where he studied law at Oxford and qualified to practice at the Bar. Having then decided that he didn't want to be a lawyer, he also graduated art school, and for many happy years he worked as a painter and sculptor, until a spell of artist's block led to a very short course in creative writing... His novels are a strange combination of humor and heartbreak, in which fallible characters struggle to make sense of their lives.