Danae Sioziou

Danae Sioziou has a great interest in mythology and imagination, but also writes about "real issues" such as oppression, gender roles in Greece and the pain language can cause. She has published two remarkable collections. In her debut Useful Children's Games, her poems were shaped by the rules of children's games. She received the Yannis Varveris Prize for Young Writers for it. In her second book - Probable landscapes - she uses poems to draw the inner map of people, wondering what you would see if you actually opened someone up. 

I no longer set traps for birds,
each day I head to the river and shoot the waters.

Danae Sioziou grew up partly in Germany, partly in Greece. In addition to writing poetry, she also translates poems and stories from German and English. She has a keen interest in mythology and imagination, but she also writes about very real topics, such as oppression, gender roles in Greece and the pain that language can cause. She has published two collections that have not gone unnoticed in her homeland. In her debut Useful Children's Games, she shapes poems using the rules of children's games. She received the Yannis Varveris Prize for Young Writers for it. In her second book - Probable landscapes - she tries to use poems to draw the inner map of people, wondering what you would find if you opened people up and what such a landscape would look like. Siozious work has been translated into more than 20 languages and published in World Literature Today, among others. At the Purple Medusas Festival, founded by Sioziou, she also gives other writers a stage. The festival focuses explicitly on literature and gender. Danae Sioziou is the first Greek poet at Poetry International since 2003 and is part of the European poetry network Versopolis. 

This is a program with poet Theophilus Kwek (Singapore). In this program, both poets read their entire festival selection with recent work.

Host: Tsead Bruinja