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Vassilis Alexakis was born in Athens in 1943 and spent his childhood on the island of Santorini. In 1961 he received a scholarship to study abroad and went to France. He enrolled in journalism school in Lille with the intent of somehow making his living as a writer. In 1964 he returned to Greece to do his military service. Three years later, the coup d'état and the installation of the military regime forced him into exile. He returned to France, this time to Paris.

His first novel, Le sandwich, was written in French and published in 1974. In 1982 he wrote is first novel in Greek, Talgo, and translated it himself into French. His novel La langue maternelle was awarded the prestigious Médicis Prize; his collection of short stories, Papa was awarded the Académie française Prize for Best Short Story Collection, and his novel Avant was awarded the Albert Camus Prize.

Les mots étrangers [Foreign Words] appeared in 2002 and was voted one of the twenty best books in any genre of that year by the editors of the literary magazine Lire. It was short-listed for two major French literary awards, the Renaudaut Prize and the Interallié Prize.

Much of Alexakis's fiction, though not strictly autobiographical, employs elements of his life to explore the relationship between identity and language, memory and the self, and exile, loss, love, and death. After the death of his father in 1995, he began learning Sango, the main language of the Central African Republic.From this autobiographical "fact" emerges a stunning work of imagination, Les mots étrangers, whose narrator also undertakes to learn Sango on the death of his father.

Alexakis now lives in Paris, Athens, and on the Greek island Tinos. He has also made four films and published a collection of drawings.

A complete bibliography of his prose in French follows: Le sandwich (novel), 1974 Les girls du City-Boum-Boum (novel), 1974 La tête du chat (novel), 1978 Talgo (novel), 1983 Controle d'identité, 1985 Le fils de King-Kong (aphorisms), 1987 Paris-Athènes (1989, autobiographical essays), Pourquoi tu pleures? (1991, short stories), Avant (1992, novel), La langue maternelle (1996, novel), L'invention du baiser (1997, aphorisms), Papa (1997, short stories), Le Coeur de Marguerite (1999, novel), Les mots étrangers (2002, novel).

Alyson Waters's translations include Louis Aragon's Treatise on Style (1991), Tzvetan Todorov's The Morals of History (1995) and, most recently, Réda Bensmaïa's Experimental Nations, Or: The Invention of the Maghreb (2003). She lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her husband and daughter. This translation was facilitated by a 2004 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship.