Antigone Kefala wins the 2017 Queensland Literary Award for Poetry

This year the Judith Wright Calanthe Award, given to an outstanding collection of poetry by an Australian writer, was awarded to Antigone Kefala for her poetry collection Fragments.

About the poet

Antigone Kefala has written four works of fiction, including The First Journey, The Island and Summer Visit, and four poetry collections, The Alien, Thirsty Weather, European Notebook and Absence: New and Selected Poems as well as the non-fiction work Sydney Journals. Born in Romania of Greek parents, she lived in Greece and New Zealand before coming to Australia.

About the book

Antigone Kefala is one of the finest Australian poets, highly regarded for the intensity of her vision, yet not widely known, on account of her minimalism, and the small number of poems she has published, each carefully worked, each magical or menacing in its effects. Fragmentsis her first collection of poems in almost twenty years, since the publication of New and Selected Poems in 1998. It follows her memoir Sydney Journals (Giramondo, 2008), of which one critic wrote, ‘Kefala can render the music of the moment so perfectly, she leaves one almost singing with the pleasure of it’. This skill in capturing the moment is just as evident in Fragments, with its linguistic precision, its heightened perception and sense of drama – though the territory is often darker now, as the poet navigates the liminal spaces between life and death, and the energies which lie in wait there.

Learn more about the Queensland Literary Awards.