Anna-Maria Athanasiou was born in 1966 in Leeds, England. Her parents are both Greek Cypriots who moved to the UK in the early sixties. After meeting and marrying her husband in 1990 the couple moved to Cyprus, where they now live with their two sons.

Throughout her life Anna-Maria had regularly created scenarios and stories in her head, thinking that one day she would eventually put them down on paper. Eventually, in the September of 2011 she took the plunge and started to write down an idea that she’d been creating for almost ten years. Anna-Maria wrote in secret for a few months before she confided in a close friend. Waiting for Summer took fourteen months to write, her original story becoming a nine hundred page two-book novel.

As the novel neared completion, Anna-Maria told a few close friends and members of her family. Her husband was astounded that she’d managed to write the novel in secret and once her brother found out he started contacting publishers within the UK.
In May of 2013 Austin Macauley Publishers offered Anna-Maria a two-book contract. Waiting for Summer Book One was published in September 2013, closely followed by Book Two in June 2014.

Anna-Maria’s second set of novels La Casa d’Italia are also now available.

To read more about “Waiting for Summer”, click here.