Fiction
The 2022 recipient of the Patrick White Literary Award, the late Antigone Kefala was one of the first writers to open Australian fiction to a diversity of voices. She is known for her nuanced and evocative prose style, which portrays the full gamut of the immigrant experience, the fleeing from war, the resettlement in foreign countries, the difficult negotiation of personal relationships, the hauntings of memory and dream. This collection brings together Kefala’s three early novellas The First Journey, The Boarding House and The Island, which have long been out of print, and her three later novellas, published together as Summer Visit by Giramondo in 2022. It also includes her childhood fable Alexia: A Tale of Two Cultures and ten short stories, previously only published in literary magazines, dating back to the beginnings of her career at the end of the 1950s.
In addition to her works of fiction, Antigone Kefala published five poetry collections, The Alien, Thirsty Weather, European Notebook, Absence: New and Selected Poems and Fragments, which won the 2017 Judith Wright Calanthe Award and was shortlisted for the Prime Minister’s Award for Poetry. She is also renowned as a writer of journals – these were published by Giramondo in two collections, Sydney Journals (2008), and her last book, Late Journals (2022). In November 2022 she received the Patrick White Literary Award, in recognition of her contribution to Australian literature. She died in December 2022, at the age of 91.
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