Helen Nickas



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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Alex Kostas Reviews Dina Amantides, Anna Couani, Zeny Giles, George Vassilacopoulos, Erma Vassiliou and Dimitris Troaditis

Owl Publishing is an independent press founded in June 1992 by Helen Nickas, a former lecturer in Greek Studies at La Trobe University. Owl’s overarching purpose is to publish a selection of literary works by Greek-Australians in pursuit of more diverse Australian literature, and it is run as a not-for-profit undertaking.

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Translingualism, Home, Ambivalence: The Poet Dimitris Tsaloumas

The death of Dimitris Tsaloumas (1921-2016) invites us to revisit and re-evaluate his poetry without the critical anxiety to place him within the historical taxonomies of Australian literature or the hermeneutical suspicion about its belonging. The task of situating his poetry will take time as the canon of Australian literature is still fluid and its main parameters are not yet finalised.

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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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