Fiction and Poetry

Commemorative slipcase of Antigone Kefala prose.

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.

Poetry brings together all the published poems of the late Antigone Kefala, one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary Australian literature. Her mixed background – in Romania, Greece, New Zealand and Australia – gave her lyric poetry a unique richness and grace. Her writing was informed by literary traditions that allowed her to achieve powerful effects by apparently simple means. Her poems are carefully worked, minimal yet resonant, evocative in their use of implication and understatement, startling in their imagery. They confront loss and grief and displacement, particularly as the consequences of war and migration. They excoriate pretension. They also express delight in the present moment, in newly discovered forms of experience and nature.