music.wikisort.org - Poet

Antigone Kefala (born 1935) is an Australian poet and prose-writer of Greek-Romanian heritage. She has been a member of the Literature Board of the Australia Council and is acknowledged as being an important voice in capturing the migrant experience in contemporary Australia.[1] In 2017, Kefala was awarded the State Library of Queensland Poetry Collection Judith Wright Calanthe Award at the Queensland Literary Awards for her collection of poems entitled Fragments.[2]

Born in Brăila, Romania in 1935, Kefala and family moved to Greece and then New Zealand after World War II. Having studied French Literature at Victoria University and obtained a MA, she relocated to Sydney, Australia in 1960.[3] There she has taught English as a second language and worked as a university and arts administrator. Her poetry and prose is written in both Greek and English, with Absence: New and Selected Poems reissued in a second edition in 1998.

Her work, written in free verse, has been described as having an almost metaphysical detachment.[4] It is characterised by an austere allusiveness unusual in Australian poetry. Aside from Greek and English it has been translated into Czech and French.[5]

In 2009, Antigone Kefala: A Writer’s Journey, an anthology of reviews, essays and analytical writing of Kefala's works edited by Professor Vrasidas Karalis and Helen Nickas was published by Owl Publishing.[6]

Works

Poetry

• The Alien (Makar Press: 1973)
• Thirsty Weather (Outback: 1978)
• European Notebook (Hale & Iremonger: 1988)
• Absence: New and selected poems (Sydney, Hale & Iremonger: 1992, 2nd ed. 1998)
• Poems: A selection (Melbourne, Owl Publishing: 2000)
• Fragments, Artarmon, N.S.W. Giramondo, 2016, ISBN 978-1-925336-19-1

Prose fiction

• The First Journey (Wild & Woolley: 1975)
• The Island (Hale & Iremonger: 1984)
• Sunday Morning in The Oxford book of Australian Short Stories selected by Michael Wilding (Melbourne : Oxford University Press: 1994)
• Summer Visit: Three Novellas (Giramondo Publishing: 2003)
• Sydney Journals (Giramondo Publishing: 2008) ISBN 978-1-920882-41-9
• Max: The Confessions of a Cat (Owl Publishing: 2009)

Awards and recognition

• 2017 Queensland Literary Awards – State Library of Queensland Poetry Collection – Judith Wright Calanthe Award for Fragments[7]

References

External links

• Antigone Kefala on Australian Poetry Library
• 3 poems with German translations in Gangway #1
• "Journal II" prose poem in Gangway #18
• "Alexia: Antigone Kefala's overdue fairytale" by Michael Tsianikas

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