Margarita Karapanou (Μαργαρίτα Καραπάνου)

Margarita Karapanou (Greek: Μαργαρίτα Καραπάνου; 19 July 1946 – 2 December 2008) was a Greek novelist, most known for her first novel, Kassandra and the Wolf. Her novels have been translated into many languages.τα.
Margarita Karapanou was born in Athens, Greece, the daughter of novelist and dramatist Margarita Liberaki and Giorgos Karapanos, a lawyer and poet. Her parents divorced and her mother moved to Paris shortly after she was born. Karapanou grew up in both Athens, with her maternal grandmother, and with her mother in Paris. She studied philosophy and cinema in Paris, and nursery school teaching through distance education in London. In Paris, she was friends with Marie-France Ionesco, the daughter of Eugène Ionesco.

Karapanou worked as a nursery school teacher and also at a private kindergarten. She struggled with bipolar disorder throughout her life.

Kassandra and the Wolf was translated into English by Nikos C. Germanacos and published by Harcourt Brace in 1976 before it was published in Greece.

Her own translation of The Sleepwalker into French won the Prix du Meilleur livre étranger in 1988.

Her diaries, Η ζωή είναι αγρίως απίθανη: Ημερολόγια 1959-1979 (Life Is Wildly Improbable: Diaries 1959-1979), were published in November 2008, shortly before she died of respiratory problems on 2 December 2008.