Paulo Coelho

We learned that the life of flight attendant you met at Transylvania was the trigger for writing The Witch of Portobello. From the impression you received from her, which part was deeply reflected to Athena?

In October 2005, I met in Transylvania a roman stewardess that told me how she had been adopted by an Austrian family and about her gypsy roots. She was merely the starting point of the novel. From this meeting I started to wave the threads of a story that for a long time I wanted to tell: the feminine side of God. The character of Athena was the Ariadne’s thread in my novel’s labyrinth.