Novel
Author: Dimitris Lyacos || Forthcoming 2027
Translated from the Greek by Andrew Barrett
Dimitris Lyacos’ website || Interview in Michigan Quarterly Review || Interview in The Common
Until the Victim Becomes Our Own is a meditation on violence, memory, and the structures that bind communities through control and exclusion.
The narrative unfolds as a chorus of shifting voices—prisoners, survivors, exiles, anonymous witnesses—moving through deserts, ruined settlements, prison zones, and industrial sites. Their accounts trace how violence evolves: from sacrifice to law, from law to labor, and finally into the impersonal codes and systemic orders of the present. Even divinity transforms along this path, from a god who feeds on blood, to a god withdrawn into private enclosures, to a dispersed presence that circulates like an endless loop—no longer a figure but a code.
Threaded through this sequence is the recurring figure of a little girl, surfacing as witness and counterpoint. Her presence interrupts the unfolding logic of violence, carrying memory and loss while holding open the possibility of another beginning.
Dimitris Lyacos writes across prose, poetry, and drama, examining violence, exclusion, ritual, and contemporary forms of coercion. He is the author of the internationally acclaimed trilogy Poena Damni (Z213: Exit, With the People from the Bridge, The First Death), translated into more than twenty languages.
Excerpts from his most recent book, Until the Victim Becomes Our Own—published in Italian as Finché la vittima non sarà nostra—have appeared in U.S. literary journals including The Columbia Review, Chicago Review, Image, MAYDAY, and River Styx. His interviews have been featured in Los Angeles Review of Books, World Literature Today, BOMB, The Common, and Gulf Coast, among others. His work has also inspired projects across other media, including music, performance, and visual art.
Andrew Barrett is a translator and musician, who lives in Detroit, Michigan. He translates from the ancient Greek and modern Greek. He is currently working with modern Greek poet and writer Dimitris Lyacos on Until the Victim Becomes our Own, the follow up to Lyacos’ Poena Damni trilogy. He is one of forty-two translators who contributed to a new translation of the Dionysiaca of Nonnus, published by The University of Michigan Press in 2022. He attended the Banff International Translation Centre.
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