Coastal Echoes at the Thessalian Poetry Festival
Coastal Echoes is a collaborative project exploring our shared environmental concerns and relationships with nature and non-human species with the aim of creating new work that reflects the challenges of climate change and global industrialization resulting in loss of biodiversity. The project has so far connected Wales with coastal regions in Turkey and India. Poets Catrin Menai and Zoë Skoulding participate in the Thessalian Poetry Festival with readings and the performance Coastal Echoes: Naming the World Again.
Catrin Menai is an artist working between Bethesda in north Wales and Glasgow. She creates narrative-driven works using the communicative potential of everyday objects, gestures, and place. Through film, writing and found objects, and grounded as much in chance encounter as in close study, she explores ways of thinking-with our world, considering love and loss as a material space for knowledge-making. Here, poetic fragments, correspondences and archival materials are layered to perform a series of call-and-responses: between languages, eras and geographies. Her work has been exhibited in the Welsh galleries Mostyn and The Turner House, and published with the Artes Mundi Journal and Poetry Wales. She participated in Touching Syria, a collaborative project at Pontio Arts Centre. She completed an MFA at the Glasgow School of Art in 2021.
Zoë Skoulding is a poet and literary critic interested in translation, sound and ecology. She is Professor of Poetry and Creative Writing at Bangor University and author of five poetry collections, including A Marginal Sea (Carcanet Press, 2022) and Footnotes to Water (2019), which won the Wales Book of the Year Poetry Award 2020, and other publications. She received the Cholmondeley Award from the Society of Authors in 2018 for her body of work in poetry, and is a Fellow of the Learned Society of Wales. Her critical work includes two monographs, Contemporary Women’s Poetry and Urban Space: Experimental Cities (2013), and Poetry & Listening: The Noise of Lyric (2020). She has initiated and developed several large-scale projects supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, such as Metropoetica, a collaborative project on translation, gender and city space. She was Editor of the international quarterly Poetry Wales 2008-2014 and co-founded the (North) Wales International Poetry Festival in 2012.
Thessalian Poetry Festival 26-29 August 2025, Larissa, Karditsa, Trikkala
Coastal Echoes in Greece is organized by Literature Across Frontiers in partnership with FRMK (ΦΡΜΚ) magazine, with support from Wales Arts International.
Photo: Nikos Katsaraos