Ioulia Kolovou is a new Scot, living on a hill in a dear green place. She studied History and Classics at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Linguistics at the University of Buenos Aires, completed an MSc in Creative Writing at the University of Edinburgh and a PhD in English Literature: Creative Writing at the University of Glasgow. She has worked as a teacher, translator, and conference interpreter in three countries and two continents. If she had a superpower, she would have liked it to be a thorough knowledge of every language and dialect in the world, historical or contemporary. So far, she has only managed English, Greek, Spanish, and French. She was short-listed for the Conrad-Nabokov Prize in its year of inception, 2009, under the penname J K Mabin. Writing fiction (and nonfiction) has been her strongest and longest passion from a very young age. She has published literary and academic works in English and Spanish. With typical timing, her first book, a historical biography of the medieval Greek author and princess Anna Komnene, came out in the Spring 2020.