Her parents divorced and her mother moved to Paris shortly after she was born.
[2] Karapanou grew up in both Athens, with her maternal grandmother, and with her mother in Paris.
[5][6] She studied philosophy and cinema in Paris, and nursery school teaching through distance education in London.
[8] Her own translation into French of her 1985 novel The Sleepwalker won the Prix du Meilleur livre étranger in 1988.
Her diaries, Η ζωή είναι αγρίως απίθανη: Ημερολόγια 1959-1979 (Life Is Wildly Improbable: Diaries 1959-1979), were published in November 2008, shortly before she died of respiratory problems on 2 December 2008.