Xenia Kounalaki was born in Hamburg in 1971. She has been a journalist in the daily newspaper Kathimerini since 1994 and a weekly columnist and foreign news editor since 2007. She contributes reports to Spiegel and Spiegel Online, Die Welt and the European. She has worked at the Greek Public Radio and Television as foreign news editor and presented her own TV program. She has co-authored the book “Βία'' (Violence, Polis editions, 2012) on political violence. In 2012, she was awarded the international press freedom prize “Premio Internazionale Per La Libertà Di Stampa“ in Florence. Her book “Στις ταινίες κλαίω στις πιο άσχετες στιγμές” (Irrelevant movie scenes make me cry, Polis editions, 2016) is a memoir, a journalist’s account of life and work in Greece during the crisis. In 2019 her speech on the International Holocaust Remembrance Day in Ioannina was published as a short essay on “Antisemitism in Greece” (Polis editions, 2019). “Οξυγόνο'' (Oxygen, Polis editions, 2019) is the title of her first novel.