Margarita Karapanou was born in Athens in 1946 and grew up in Athens and Paris. She was the author of five novels, the first of which, Kassandra and the Wolf, has been translated into four languages; in 1974, even before the Greek edition came out, Nick Germanacos's English translation of it was published by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. The Sleepwalker has likewise been translated into four languages, and Karapanou's own French translation of the book, Le Somnambule (Paris: Gallimard, 1987), won the French national prize for the best foreign novel. She died in 2008.