Who is Maria Toloudi?
Maria Toloudi lives in Alexandroupolis, Greece, where she was born in 1953. She currently works as Press Attaché at the Prefecture of Evros, in the Region of Thrace and Eastern Macedonia.
After high school, she attended Art History classes in Oxford, UK for two years. She returned to Greece during the early days of Μεταπολίτευση (the period following the fall of the military junta), and lived for five years in Thessaloniki, inside the Academic community of the city (her spouse used to work as Assistant Professor then). During that period she attended various lectures on subjects of Architecture, Sociology and Political Sciences.
Late seventies she returned to her hometown with her spouse and their two daughters, and a few years later she was engaged as civil servant at the Prefecture, in Alexandroupolis. She initially worked on projects related to illiteracy of adults and older people, and she also helped Evros village populations in numerous initiatives and government programs to bridge diversity, help minorities, protect the natural habitat, and help create the necessary conditions for a sustainable future. In about the same time she appeared weekly on national radio (approx. 2+ years) to inform audiences about local tradition and the role of the woman.
In her encounters with the locals she heard numerous stories from the mouth of the elderly about traditional life and habits & customs in the Evros area. Those stories inspired her profoundly and she later made the decision to write them down, as many as possible, in the literary form of short stories. She has written about a hundred so far, aiming to pass the legacy to the younger and future generations.
Through the years, she's been regularly invited to chair book presentation events and review new literary works of well known authors. Among those were Rhea Galanaki, Lena Divani, Dimitri Konstantaras, Stelios Kouloglou, Paul Matesis, Seraphim Phyntanidis, George Skampardonis, Peter Tatsopoulos, Eurydice Trisson, and others. Between 1995 and 2008 she has been instrumental in organizing annual Pan-Hellenic Journalist Congresses in Samothrace, where journalists from the whole of Greece assembled to exchange and express their ideas, criticisms, opinions and viewpoints.
Since early last decade she has been regularly publishing her stories in the literature magazine “Περιωδικό της πόλης” (Alpha Media Group). Late 2011 she published some of her work (short stories, chronicles, poems) in the form of print and electronic books. Such became recently available via popular Internet based bookstores (Amazon, B&N, Lulu, iBookstore, Blurb, etc…).
Her stories and poems, often using common Evros dialect forms and expressions, are intriguing, emotional, mysterious, full of innuendos, often laden with torrential momentum brought about by sequences of rich nouns and powerful adjectives, utmost passionate and exciting. Indeed, passion and search of the soul in all things surrounding her, be it alive or simply lifeless objects, are the crucial elements of her personal philosophy.