LAF at the Chania Book Festival
Poets Zoë Skoulding and Katerina Iliopoulou, together with LAF director Alexandra Büchler presented the Literature Across Frontiers project Coastal Echoes at the Chania Book Festival, where Alexandra Büchler also spoke on a panel dedicated to the topic of gender and literary translation with poet and translator Danae Sioziou and translator Theo Votsos.
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. After jointly exploring the Kerala coast in Kovalam in February 2025, Katerina Iliopoulou, Catrin Menai and Zoë Skoulding met again at the Chania Book Festival and continued their collaboration in September on the Methana Peninsula, following participation in the Thessalian Poetry Festival.
Participating artists
Katerina Iliopoulou is an award-winning poet, editor, translator and literary curator who lives and works in Athens. She is the author of five poetry books, a book of poetry and photography, a collection of short stories, and a novel awaiting publication. She has also edited collections of essays on poetics. Her poetry has been extensively translated and published in literary reviews, journals and anthologies. She has participated in numerous festivals and co-organized and curated a series of projects that combine poetry with visual arts and performance and seek a different relationship with public space and the audience. Since 2013 she is the editor-in-chief of FRMK (FaRMaKo), a cutting edge journal in print on poetry, theory and the visual arts. She is also the editor of the Odradek series of short poetry and prose booklets from FRMK editions. Her translations include the work of Sylvia Plath and Walt Whitman in collaboration with her sister Eleni Iliopoulou. From 2015 to 2019 she collaborated with the Onassis Foundation’s Cavafy Archive on teaching the poet in public schools, was the director of the Young Writers’ Festival at the Thessaloniki International Book Fair. Since 2022 she is the Greek partner of the Berlin based international platform for poetry, lyrikline.org.
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.
Chania Book Festival, 25-29 June 2025
Coastal Echoes in Greece is organized by Literature Across Frontiers in partnership with FRMK (ΦΡΜΚ) magazine, with support from Wales Arts International.
Photo courtesy Chania Book Festival