Antigone Kefala



Unearthing the Greek in the Australian: an Account of Owl Publishing’s History and Foundation

Poetry publishers are an essential staple of the poetry community. When their existence is challenged by funding cuts, blinkered economic rationalisation and misguided consumerism, poets rail – as we should. But when a publisher like Owl Publishing quietly states, it …

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Review Short: Antigone Kefala’s Fragments

When casting an eye back at Antigone Kefala’s oeuvre, one finds a poet of the surreal, who has delicately combined reality, folklore, and dream state. She has expressed the trauma of migration and diaspora in hallucinatory ways; she once merged the ache of an old country’s absence with the comfort of myth, and heightened the contrast with dream-like and often disturbing symbolism.

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Antigone in Aotearoa: Interview with Kefala (O’Keefe edit)

Kefala discusses her work as a poet, novelist and translator in this interview from 1974. New Zealand gets a look in however for the most part she is more interested in reinstating her European perspective and sensibility.

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Falling Angels: A Chapbook Curated by Anna Couani

In curating this collection, I asked the writers to provide pieces that are short, edgy, and I’m happy that they have fulfilled that very loose brief. The disrupted texts they’ve produced – whilst having interesting formal qualities – also have poignant emotive qualities. The term I use for what others refer to as prose-poetry is experimental prose because I find that term broader and more inclusive. I asked several visual artists to suggest works that I could take or requested particular works I had already seen.

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A Diasporic Journey: Greek-Australian Poetry in Bilingual and English Publications

It all started for me in 1983 when Dimitris Tsaloumas – a Greek poet in Melbourne – had just won the National Book Council Award for best book of the year with his poetry collection The Observatory, in bilingual form. In other words, he had won an award based on the translations of his original Greek poems, as the judging panel did not have any knowledge of Greek. It was certainly a first for Australian letters.

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Reading Old Diaries

I was telling Jurgis last night that his bats had arrived again to eat the figs. I said: ‘Your friends have been coming again, the other night, while I was on the terrace, with their floppy wings.’ And he: ‘… …

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