3 Greek Islands Authors Can’t Stop Writing About

Corfu leads the Greek entries at number three. The island’s appeal to writers is nothing new. Gerald Durrell’s “My Family and Other Animals” turned his childhood years there, from 1935 to 1939, into one of the most beloved memoirs in the English language. More recently, Dinah Jefferies’ 2025 novel “The Greek House” revisits the island through the story of a woman returning to her family home and the memory of her brother’s disappearance.

Corfu has the kind of layered texture that gives writers something to work with: Venetian architecture in the old town, mountain villages farther inland, beaches that shift from pebble to sand depending on which coast you follow. It is a place with enough history and contradiction to sustain a narrative.

Lefkada (+66%): The Quiet Island With Turquoise Water

Lefkada, at number five, is sometimes called the Caribbean of Greece for its improbable turquoise water. Simon Scarrow set his novel “Hearts of Stone” there, beginning in 1938 and following a friendship torn apart by the Second World War. The island’s relative quiet, compared to its more famous neighbors, may be part of what draws authors looking for a setting that feels both specific and uncrowded by associations.

Kefalonia (+26%): The Island Behind a Modern Classic

Kefalonia ties for seventeenth place with Dubrovnik. The island’s literary reputation owes a lasting debt to Louis de Bernières’ “Captain Corelli’s Mandolin,” which put its wartime history into wide circulation and never quite let go.

Italy and Beyond: The Other Places Grabbing Writers’ Attention

Italy, it should be said, dominates the list outright. The Amalfi Coast sits at number one, followed by Cinque Terre. Apulia, Sicily, Rome and Venice all appear as well, giving the country six entries in total. Rebecca Serle’s bestselling “One Italian Summer,” set in Positano, is one recent example of the Amalfi Coast’s pull on contemporary fiction. But the lineage runs back at least to Patricia Highsmith’s “The Talented Mr. Ripley,” whose fictional resort town Mongibello is widely understood to be modeled on Positano.

Elsewhere on the list, the surprises are instructive. Dubai at number four reflects a city whose real-world transformation over the past two decades has given novelists new material to explore. Joseph O’Neill’s Booker-longlisted “The Dog” follows a New Yorker relocating there after a breakup, using the city’s gleaming surfaces as a kind of mirror for emotional displacement. Cappadocia, Lake Bled and Kotor all appear in the top ten, places where landscape and atmosphere are strong enough to carry a story on their own. The Lofoten Islands of Norway, at number fourteen, suggest that remoteness and dramatic light hold their own particular appeal for the literary imagination.

What the CV Villas study ultimately reveals is not just where writers are setting their stories but where the collective imagination is wandering. These are not necessarily the most visited places in the world, or the most written about in total. They are the ones gaining narrative momentum. And for Greece, the presence of three islands on the list suggests that the country’s hold on writers is not a leftover from classical tradition but something alive and still growing.