Antigone Kefala boxed set: Poetry and Fiction | Australian literature
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Boxed set: Poetry and Fiction
Antigone Kefala boxed set, Poetry and Fiction.
Fiction, Poetry

692 pages
Boxed set
Published April 2025
ISBN 9781923106291

Boxed set: Poetry and Fiction

Antigone Kefala
Poetry by Antigone Kefala, Australian author.

Poetry

Poetry brings together all the poems in Antigone Kefala’s six previous poetry books, published over fifty years. 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.

Fiction by Antigone Kefala, Australian author.

Fiction

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.

With an elegant slipcase design, this boxed set includes two commemorative editions celebrating the fiction and poetry of the great Australian writer, Antigone Kefala. This set, which has a strictly limited edition run, is ideal for both collectors and those new to Kefala’s work.

It is a gift to have [Kefala’s] complete works available in two immaculate, compact volumes… Highly compressed force-fields, Kefala’s creations are primed to detonate, to release what she believed to be deeper nurturing forces and energies.
James Provencher, ArtFuse

This two-volume collection feels necessary, too, inviting readers who think beyond restrictive categories to appreciate, as Juchau puts it, the austerity and radiance of Kefala’s work.
Felicity Plunkett, Australian Book Review

Both volumes form a literary legacy shaped by movement – across borders, languages, forms, and lives… Antigone Kefala is no longer a footnote in Australian literary history. She is a central figure – an artist who shaped a language of exile, of resilience, of grace.
Stavros Messinis, TGA News

About the Author

Author Antigone Kefala

Antigone Kefala

Antigone Kefala (1931–2022) wrote three works of fiction, The First Journey, The Island and Alexia, and 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. Her collections of journals are Summer Visit, Sydney Journals and Late Journals, her final work. She was the recipient of the 2022 Patrick White Literary Award. Two commemorative volumes celebrating Kefala’s writing, a poetry and fiction collection respectively, were published by Giramondo in April 2025.

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