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Reading Greece
Reading Greece8 hours ago
Poem of the Day by Maria Laina

She fell out of her body
and rolled softly on top of the snow
from day to day;
perhaps a place like this exists, she thought
but old and quiet
no temptation
no love.
So she lowered her fan.

[From the bilingual edition “Hers” (World Poetry Books, 2022), translated in English by Karen Van Dyck]

Considered on the most important representatives of the so-called generation of the 1970s, Maria Laina, in “Hers”, takes inspiration from Sappho’s women-centered past and Cavafy’s homoerotic future, and presents an ascetic yet autoerotic treatise on love at odds with societal norms.

In the words of A.E. Stallings, “Hers is a book at once abstract and grounded, elusively cerebral and erotically charged, like flashes of images in splinters of a broken mirror, a minimalism that reflects and refracts. The surface simplicity of these poems arguably make them all the more difficult to render into English, but Karen Van Dyck has deftly brought them into a transparent idiom that lets their mystery shine through”.

💡To learn more about Maria Laina, read her interview to Reading Greece:

👉Maria Laina on Poetry as the Pre-Eminent Vehicle of Feeling and Emotion
https://www.greeknewsagenda.gr/reading-greece-maria-laina-on-poetry-as-the-pre-eminent-vehicle-of-feeling-and-emotion/

👉Books of the Month: ‘Rose Fear’ and ‘Hers’ by Maria Laina
https://www.greeknewsagenda.gr/books-of-the-month-rose-fear-hers-and-by-maria-laina/

🖼 Katraki Vasso (1914 - 1988), The Loneliness of Antigone, 1977, Stonecut, 106 x 76 cm// National Gallery-Alexandros Soutsos Museum
Reading Greece
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Reading Greece
Reading Greece1 day ago
📚📚Greece at the 77th Frankfurter Buchmesse (15–19 October 2025)

Dynamic and multifaceted, Greece’s participation in the 77th Frankfurter Buchmesse follows the country’s successful presence at the LIBER International Book Fair in Madrid (7-9 October 2025) and precedes its role as Guest of Honour at the Sharjah International Book Fair (5-16 November 2025).

With the Philippines as Guest of Honour and the motto “The imagination peoples the air”, the 77th Frankfurt Book Fair stands as the world’s leading meeting point for the global #publishing community - a marketplace for rights and licences, a platform for cultural dialogue, and a celebration of stories, #authors, and #readers.

The Greek participation includes 61 #publishers, cultural organizations, and institutions -19 of which are represented in person- and showcases around 800 publications of Greek works. These include editions published by the Ministry of Culture and its supervised institutions, cultural foundations, and both Greek and foreign publishing houses that release #translations of Greek books. A special focus is placed on the GreekLit Translation Grant Programme, implemented by the Hellenic Foundation for Books and Culture.

The cultural events programme, organized in collaboration with Greek publishers and the Consulate General of Greece in Frankfurt, features, among other activities, discussions within the framework of the Ministry’s new initiative “Reading Clubs of Greek Books Around the World”, as well as presentations on the Greek book market and recent translations of Greek literature into German.
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Greece's national participation in the international book fairs is implemented for the years 2023 to 2025 by the Directorate of Letters of the General Directorate of Contemporary Culture of the Hellenic Ministry of Culture, within the framework of the National Recovery and Resilience Plan of the European Union.

Υπουργείο Πολιτισμού
HFBC Ελληνικό Ίδρυμα Βιβλίου και Πολιτισμού
Greece - International Book Fairs
Reading Greece
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Reading Greece
Reading Greece2 days ago
📚📚Theatre and performance lecturer, director and writer Natalie Katsou spoke to Reading Greece about the meeting point between #theatre and #poetry, as well as about experimentation as a strong moving force in her work.

"Experimentation for me is essentially a mixture of curiosity and playfulness, together with the pure enjoyment of writing as practice, as a physical way of being/doing.

[...] Theatre and poetry are constant projects/projectors. They reflect what is here now and they shape possibilities ahead. Looking for a different way to say the same thing, employing a different medium, genre, or language, or jumping from verse to soliloquies is a freedom and a compelling passion to share that freedom, to share ideas – ideas that are profoundly influenced by that adventure and practice. Wasn’t Borges who said that each writer constantly writes the same book?"

Κάπα Εκδοτική / Kapa Publishing House

📷 ©Yiannis Katsaris
Reading Greece
Reading Greece: Natalie Katsou – “Experimentation is a strong moving force in my work”
Natalie Katsou is a theatre and performance lecturer, a director and a writer. Natalie studied Law (BA) and Theatre Studies (BA) at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens and she completed her acting training at Delos-Hatoupi Acting School. She had her Master of Fine Arts (MFA) in Theatr...
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