George Papaellinas was born of Greek Cypriot parents who migrated to Australia after the Second World War. He attended Sydney Boys' High School; studied Classical Greek at the University of Sydney and completed a Bachelor of Arts degree in Communications at the New South Wales (NSW) Institute of Technology (now the University of Technology Sydney). Papaellinas has worked in a variety of jobs including taxi-driving, lecturing in professional writing at the University of Technology, Sydney and lecturing in fiction writing at Deakin University, Toorak Campus, Melbourne.
In 1986, his collection of short stories, Ikons, was shortlisted in the NSW Premier's Awards. Papaellinas has been writer-in-residence at Tranby Aboriginal College, Glebe, NSW, and in 1989, a Nancy Keesing Fellow-in-Residence at the Cité des Arts, Paris. He was the founder of the Writers in the Park readings at the Harold Park Hotel, Sydney, and the organiser of 'Dis/Unities', Carnivalé Writers' Week, Sydney, between 1987 and 1990. In 2004, Papaellinas and Helen Addison-Smith edited Mumma's Kitchen : recipes and stories. Papaellinas has more recently been a tutor in the English Department at the University of Melbourne and has been battling multiple sclerosis.
(Source: 'George Papaellinas' in George Kanarakis Greek Voices in Australia : a tradition of prose, poetry and drama (1987); George Papaellinas, 'Not', The Age (12 February 2005))
