Born from a Greek, British, Ghanaian father and a Persian mother, Aurora Kastanias grew up in Rome, where her parents fled to during the Iranian Revolution. She attended a French Catholic school and started journaling at the age of eight. By eleven, she was writing her first short stories for friends’ entertainment, displaying playful imagination and a profound affection towards humanity as a whole; a sentiment she will later describe as ‘innate and ineluctable’; a sentiment which will underline all her later works.

Influenced by French 17th and 18th century authors and fascinated by the Age of Enlightenment, Aurora Kastanias wrote her first yet unreleased novel during her stay in Lebanon in 2002. Titled Nowhere Nowhen, she responds to Diderot’s ‘Jacques the Fatalist and his Master’, rejecting the posit that “Everything that happens to us down here, whether for good or for evil, has been written up above”. Firmly condemning all notions of fatalism or determinism, she propounds humankind’s infinite potential albeit accepting the limits of our time, whilst entrusting evolution to eventually prove her right.

In the course of her university studies she further became acquainted with the Theatre of the Absurd and entranced by several existential authors and absurdists influencing the stile and mood of her second novel, Darius, Exilium Vita Est, first published in 2009. An homage to Victor Hugo and his exile in the isle of Guernsey, this time she responds to Beckett’s ‘Waiting for Godot’, prompting man to take action, be curious and quest, as opposed to simply wait for something to happen; encouraging him to give meaning to his life as opposed to wait for a mystic meaning to be revealed.

In 2016, after closing her concert wine bar in Bordeaux, Aurora Kastanias publishes her second novel, Argos, Jacta Alea Esto, a story on three timelines retracing the entire XXth century through the eyes of an improbable main character and its encounters with eminent figures of the time. The book opens with a quote by Arthur Schopenhauer from ‘The World as Will and Idea’:

“With the exception of man, no being wonders at its own existence.”

This notion becomes the essence of all Aurora Kastanias’ literary pieces, as in awe she portrays each single aspect observed of humanity, its life, its sentiments, its surroundings, and the Universe its abode. She does so through five years of poems, collectively named Poeticles and released in a series of five volumes.

In 2019 she publishes her first post-apocalyptic fantasy story, Goggle-Travelling through the Meaning of Life: The Adventures of Goggleman. In this novel she indulges in retracing the steps of humanity creating fantastic sceneries whilst reconciling notions of religions, philosophy and physics.

Aurora Kastanias is currently studying astrophysics and in the process of writing her next oeuvre On the Universe and Humanity.