Poetry Reading with Peter Constantine and Eleni Kefala Festival of Languages - Pay What You Can £6.00 / £4.00
Peter Constantine will read from My language has no bones, his poetry collection in progress, translated by Jake Syersack. Arvanitika is one of the severely endangered non-Greek oral languages of Greece. Peter grew up hearing it spoken near Mount Pendelikon and in a village between Corinth and Mycenae, and is almost certainly the last person writing in it. Since his uncle, the poet Yorgos Soukoulis, died in 2017, the language has closed around him ‘like an empty room'. What remains is a grammar of one: kept alive through self-dialogues, written for almost no one left who can read it.
Eleni Kefala reads from Direct Orient (2024), winner of the State Poetry Prize in Cyprus and the Academy of Athens G. Athanas Poetry Award (Greece), and shortlisted for the State Poetry Prize in Greece. Following a Cypriot woman's journey from Birmingham to Athens in 1973, the book unfolds against a rich literary backdrop, weaving family and world history into a meditation on migration, conflict, memory, and women's voices across time.