Maria Topali was born in Thessaloniki in 1964 and studied law in Athens and Frankfurt, the latter as a Daimler-Benz Foundation Fellow. She worked for the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, a German political party foundation, as its director for Greece, and served as Director of the think tank OPEC. She currently works in the publications and scientific information unit of the National Center for Social Research. She has published four collections of poetry, a work of prose with Konstantinos Matsoukas, and an anthology of 21st century Greek poetry titled Piisi me pisma (Poetry with Grit, first published in 2018 in Berlin by Edition Romiosini, in a German translation by Torsten Israel). She is a frequent contributor to the Sunday edition of the Kathimerini newspaper, where she has been writing a monthly column on poetry since 20018. She is also a member of the editorial board of the literary magazine Piitiki. She took part in the “Cavafy Goes to School” program organized by the Cavafy Archives and the Onassis Foundation. In cooperation with photographer Marilena Stafilidou, she develops educational programs on poetry and photography for the NGO “art-in-art”. Along with Maro Michalakakou, she organized the “Collage and Literature” studio of the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Center.
