British author and philhellene Victoria Hislop met the Prime Minister of Greece, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, who presented her with her official Greek citizenship certificate.
Hislop writes often about Greece and has used the country as the setting for most of her historical novels, which have sold millions of copies worldwide, including the well-known best-seller, The Island, which was also turned into a successful television mini-series in Greece.
Mitsotakis Tweeted after his meeting with the British author that granting Hislop citizenship is a “practical thank you for the support she has given Greece through her writings.”
Actor Tom Hanks and his wife, actor and producer Rita Wilson, were given the honor last year for their support in raising money for victims of a deadly Greek wildfire. The couple received Greek passports this year when Mitsotakis visited them on the island of Antiparos where t5he couple own a summer home.
Hislop said she was honored by the gesture. “I love Greece with all its problems and difficulties, not just because it’s a beautiful country,” she said at her meeting with Mitsotakis.
Her latest novel, The Thread, has been called by Publisher’s Weekly, “A beautiful and epic novel that spans nearly a hundred years, The Thread is a magnificent story of a friendship and a love that endures through the catastrophes and upheavals of the twentieth century–both natural and man-made–in the turbulent city of Thessaloniki.”
In another book called The Sunrise, she set it in 1974 during the Turkish invasion of Cyprus and tells the intersecting stories of three families whose lives are decimated when brewing ethnic tensions erupt into conflict.
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