Literary Ways 2: Greece-Ireland

The Municipality of Ilion will host the second Literary Ways event at the Melina Mercouri Cultural Centre on Friday, 12 December 2008 at 20.00.

Literary Ways 2 will bring together poets from Ireland and Greece for a symposium on contemporary poetry. Nanos Valaoritis, Tassos Denegris and Dimitris Lyacos and the Irish poets, Kevin Higgins, Susan Millar DuMars and Patrick Chapman will read extracts from their work.


Professors David Connolly and Victor Ivanovic from Aristotle University of Thessaloniki will chair the discussion which will follow. Literary translators Lina Sipitanou and Shorsha Sullivan will also participate in the event.
A special bilingual publication, containing extracts from works of each of the poets, will be available at the event and from bookshops and Cultural Institutes in Athens city centre.
The first Literary Ways event was hosted by the Municipality of Ilion in 2006 with participation of poets from Greece and Austria.

Literary Ways 2: Greece – Ireland
Melina Mercouri Cultural Centre
Agiou Fanouriou 99, Ilion, Athens.
Friday, 12 December at 20.00.

The event is organised with the support of the Municipality of Ilion, Culture Ireland and the Embassy of Ireland.
For further details contact:
http://it.mc286.mail.yahoo.com/mc/compose?to=politistiko@ilion.gr
tel. 2102637795
or Caroline Phelan at mailto:mCaroline.Phelan@dfa.ie

C.V.

Tassos Denegris
Tassos Denegris (Athens,1934) has published 7 collections of poetry andtranslated, among others, J.L.Borges, J.Cortasar ,O. Paz, John DosPassos ,I. B. Singer. He has been translated into English, French,German, Spanish, Portuguese and Hungarian. Fellow at the International Writing Programme (Iowa,1975), invited guest at the Cambridge Poetry Festival (1983), he has also given readings in Belgrade, New Delhi, Strasbourg, Tuebingen, Colombia, Peru, USA, Spain, Nottingham. Tassos Denegris' collected poems "The Wildboar Speaks", was recently published by Ypsilon/books.

Nanos Valaoritis

Born in Lausanne, Switzerland, in 1921. He studied Classics and Law at the University of Athens, English literature at London University, and followed a course of Mycenean Grammar with Michel Lejeune at the "Ecoles des Hautes Etudes" of the Sorbonne. From 1944 – 1953, in London he translated and presented, Modernist Greek poets of the thirties for the first time in Cyril Connolly's "Horizon" 1946 & translations for John Lehmann's "New Writing" 1944-1948.

He met T.S Eliot, Stephen Spender, W.H Auden, Dylan Thomas and worked for Louis MacNeice in the BBC. In 1954 he moved to Paris, met Andre Breton, and participated in the activities and meetings of his Surrealist group until 1960. He returned to Greece, in 1960 and edited the avantgarde review "Pali" 1963-1967. He left Greece again in 1968, after the Junta came to power in 1967. Taught "Creative Writing and Comparative Literature" at San Francisco StateUniversity, returned to Paris and Greece in 1976-78 and resumed teaching at SFSU 1978 until his retirement in 1993. Co-edited in Greece the literary review "Synteleia" ( End of Time), with poet Andreas Pagoulatos. Wrote a number of books of poetic prose, a novella, and four novels - among them, "My Afterlife Guaranteed" in English (City Lights1990) and in Greek (1995). Divides his time between Greece, France and California. Married to American Surrealist painter Marie Wilson.

Dimitris Lyacos

Dimitris Lyacos was born in Athens in 1966. He studied law at the University of Athens and philosophy at University College London. His trilogy Poena Damni (Z213: Exit, Nyctivoe, The First Death), written over the course of fifteen years, has been translated into English, Spanish, Italian and German and has been performed extensively across Europe and the USA. A sound and sculpture installation of Nyctivoe opened in London and toured Europe in 2004-2005. A contemporary theatre-dance version of the same book was showing in Greece in 2006-2007. Lyacos' work has been the subject of lectures and research at various universities, including Miami, Amsterdam, Trieste and Oxford. Various extracts from the trilogy have appeared in literary journals around the world. Z213: Exit will be published in Greece next spring byYpsilon/books. For more information on the author visit http://www.lyacos.net/.

Patrick Chapman

Patrick Chapman was born in 1968 and lives in Dublin, Ireland. His poetry collections are Jazztown (Raven Arts Press, 1991); The New Pornography (Salmon, 1996); Breaking Hearts and Traffic Lights (Salmon,2007); and A Shopping Mall on Mars (BlazeVOX, 2008). He has also written a collection of stories, The Wow Signal (Bluechrome, 2007) and an audiodrama, Doctor Who: Fear of the Daleks (Big Finish, 2007). He wrote the multi-award-winning film, Burning the Bed (2003), adapting from his own short story. The film starred Gina McKee and Aidan Gillen. In 2003, he won first prize for a story in the Cinescape Genre Literary Awards. In 2006, he and Philip Casey founded the Irish Literary Revival website. His New and Selected Poems is forthcoming from Salmon.

Susan Millar DuMars

Susan Millar DuMars is a US born writer who makes her home in Galway, Ireland. Her debut poetry collection, Big Pink Umbrella was published by Salmon Poetry in April 2008. A mini-collection of her short stories, American Girls, was published by Lapwing Press in 2007. Susan and her husband Kevin Higgins organise the successful literary events series, Over the Edge, in Galway.

Kevin Higgins

Kevin Higgins was born in London in 1967 but grew up in Galway City, where he still lives. With his wife Susan Millar DuMars, he co-organises the successful Over The Edge literary events in Galway. Kevin also facilitates poetry workshops at Galway Arts Centre; teaches creative writing at Galway Technical Institute and was recently Writer-in-Residence at Merlin Park Hospital.

He is the poetry critic of the Galway Advertiser and was a founding co-editor of The Burning Bush literary magazine. Kevin's first collection of poems The Boy With NoFace was published by Salmon in February 2005. The Boy With No Face was short-listed for the 2006 Strong Award for Best First Collection by an Irish Poet. His second collection, Time Gentlemen, Please, was published in March 2008 by Salmon. One of the poems from Time Gentlemen, Please, 'My Militant Tendency', was highly commended by the judges of this year's Forward Poetry Prize and features in the Forward Book of Poetry 2009.

Kevin won the 2003 Cúirt Festival Poetry Grand Slam and was awarded a literature bursary by the Arts Council in 2005. Kevin's work is discussed in poet-critic Justin Quinn's Cambridge Introduction to Modern Irish Poetry (Cambridge University Press, 2008). A recent poem of his poems, 'Ourselves Again', has been selected for inclusion in Best of Irish Poetry 2009.