This year's State Prize 2025, in the category of Literature for Older Children and Teenagers, was awarded to Anna Kouppanou for her work "When the sea left us", a story based on true events from Cyprus in 1974, published by Pataki Publications in 2024. In "When the sea left us", Anna Kouppanou writes a story that hits home. in the teenage heart: loss, fear, strength, survival. We spoke with the author about how a book can be a companion during a difficult time in life — and why young adults' literature doesn't need to "protect," but to trust.
You deal strongly with issues of grief and trauma. How did you approach the vulnerability of the heroes without exploiting it?
Leaving something in silence and on the sidelines does not equate to respect. This failure to acknowledge that one has experienced a traumatic event leads to further internalization and exacerbation, as well as guilt about the trauma. It can also lead to the devaluation and silencing of specific human experiences, often belonging to marginalized groups.
So for me, the point of this book was to create a fictional world around the real stories of the unaccompanied children of 1974, in a way that respects the complexity of the experiences of both the protagonists and protagonists, the subjectivity of each and every one, as well as the accuracy of the testimonies.
My intention was not to represent the trauma from a historiographical point of view, nor – even worse – to use it as a spectacle, but to approach with respect the human experience of each girl and each boy involved in these stories. With this perspective, children's vulnerability became not a plot device, but a point of investigation, understanding, recording, recognition and respect.
How political is the book after all? And if it is, where exactly is its political dimension hidden if it exists and is it not just a narrative?
I believe that the book is political, but in a way that is expressed more through the narrative than through overt statements or a guiding mood towards specific messages. Its political dimension lies in its choice of perspectives: it focuses on the most vulnerable members of a community, children, and attempts to include as many groups of children as possible.
There is also a special focus on the girls' perspective, as girls are an even more vulnerable group in war conditions. At the same time, there is an emphasis on the dynamics of female and girl friendship – the alliances that are formed on a micro scale so that a small collective can support its members to survive and thrive. Indeed, the girls in the story find refuge and create something meaningful in a boarding school kitchen, and through their friendship they are empowered and build their lives.
So I think that casting a girl as the protagonist is in itself a political gesture – a small claim for space within a story usually articulated by grown men. This decision was not accidental. I wanted to honor the way the story reached me, through the narration of a friend whose aunt was one of the unaccompanied children, but also to highlight the fact that the women's and children's experiences of '74 are often lost in the dominant narratives of History, creating a tradition of the unspeakable.
What did you want the reader to "stay with" when they turn the last page?
I hadn't thought of that. Each and every reader projects a part of himself or herself into the story and in the end creates something that is, to a great extent, personal.
I, as a reader, experienced through the experience a feeling of compassion, which in everyday life can function as a political act, because it gives strength to people who do not have it at the present moment. It gives them space to stand and reflect on their identity and biography. As I wrote, I realized that this compassion was something I felt too – a need to look at the past with understanding and tenderness, even at my own childhood self.
But if I wanted something to remain, it would be the power of childhood: the paradoxical ability of children to endure, invent, and turn pain into play, imagination, and life. I hope the reader will close the book with the knowledge that even within the most difficult stories there is light, resilience, and the perseverance of the individual — and perhaps, the child in particular — to survive and rebuild himself. A persistence that reveals a form of intentionality that we often attribute solely to the adult.
Your language is often poetic and sensual. How do you build that atmosphere?
The poetic and sensory language arose from the fact that the intended reader – but also the narrator of the story – are children. Children usually do not approach the world abstractly or conceptually (although they can). They feel him through their senses. The world for them is tangible: colors, smells, small details that seem huge. So as I wrote, I tried to see the world as children might see it — through images, feel, rhythm. So I would go inside the tent and observe.
I wanted to strike a balance between the poetry that often accompanies children's perception and the immediacy of children's experience. Because for children, trauma, fear or joy are not expressed theoretically: they manifest with the body, the movement, the gaze and the sense of space. This materiality and the embodied dimension of childhood experience also shaped the tone of the narrative.
Do you think literature can act as a tool for healing or understanding trauma?
I don't believe that literature is the answer to everything, but the research around expressive writing and life-writing clearly shows that both reading and writing can have a profoundly therapeutic effect. When we write or read about pain and trauma, something shifts: the experience takes on a new form and the person who experienced it shifts from the role of the experiencer to the role of the observer. For a while, perhaps, he witnesses the events.
This shift has great power. The trauma does not fade away, but acquires a new meaning, context, narrative structure. The person sees themselves not only as she/he who was hurt, but also as she/he who was able to talk about the trauma and observe it from a distance. Cognitively and emotionally, this process functions as a kind of reconciliation with experience – not as redemption, but as an opportunity to look at it, to name it, to fit it into your biographical landscape. And there, I think, lies the real therapeutic dimension of literature.
What is the truest moment you have experienced as a writer?
The truest moments I've experienced as a writer are not in the writing process, but in those moments when my stories meet a person and something moves inside him/her.
I remember, for example, "Lena and the Bee", a book of mine that talks about how love fits into both big and small things. This idea – which may sound abstract – worked therapeutically for a young child who had lost his mother. After his father read the book, he shared with the children at his school that he carried a small box of his mother's favorite flowers and carried her love with him. Exactly, because love can fit even in the smallest. It was there that I realized what a children's book can really do.
I experienced something similar with "When the sea left us". I am deeply moved that not only children but also adults contact me, even people who lived through the events as children, and confess to me that through the book they finally found a way to talk to their childhood selves. This, to me, is perhaps one of the most meaningful rewards of writing.
And there are smaller, but equally true moments. I remember a discussion at a school when we were talking about my book Phoebus and the Whale. One child, after hearing the story, came up and confided in me his own fears – as did other children in many classrooms where the book was taught, and asked me about mine. At that moment, I felt again that literature can open spaces that do not open otherwise. These meetings are for me one of the most authentic moments of writing: when the story stops being just text and becomes a relationship.
How does your work speak to the contemporary social challenges of Cyprus? Or the world.
The phenomenon of children being forced en masse to live without their parents is timeless and global. From the children who moved unaccompanied from the cities to the countryside in Great Britain to escape Nazi bombing, to those in Japan who were moved away from Allied bombing in World War II; to the children who today remain unaccompanied in Gaza due to the bombing of the Israeli state. From children who were unaccompanied due to the Greek and Spanish civil wars in the 20th century, to those forced to move unaccompanied due to the Syrian civil war in the 21st century.
Today, especially, children are not separated from their parents only because of war, but also because of other man-made afflictions, such as poverty, crime or climate change. Some of these children also reach our place. In other words, the story the book tells is not isolated in time or space. It is just one example of a phenomenon that is repeated among others, it calls us to reflect both on our own responsibilities in relation to the reasons that children move away from their parents and on the way we stand towards these children.
Was this award a reward to yourself, or to something bigger than that - to releasing an important history of Cyprus into the public sphere?
The prize, of course, was a joy and a reward for personal effort – a process that carried research, emotional involvement and much doubt. But I also felt it as something much bigger than me. As a recognition that this story, a history of Cyprus that was left on the sidelines, especially from the children's point of view, found a place in the public sphere.
And for me this has an even deeper meaning, because this story is not only about the past. It is connected to the stories of children who today experience war, displacement, migration, who travel unaccompanied and carry traumas that are often not named. Giving space to the experience of the children of '74 is like holding up a mirror to the children of today, a way of saying that their stories deserve to be told and heard.
If the prize contributes to this – to free a memory, to recognize the experience of his children then and to speak to the experience of his children now – then the joy it brings is magnified. It is not only a reward to me, but to history itself and to all the children who lived it or still live it in another form today.
