Antigone Kefala Sydney Journals review and information of the content of the diary of the Romania-born Australian author and poet. Transit Books will republish the Antigone Kefala book, on March 26, 2025. Here you can read information about the content of the book, the author and the publication.
Antigone Kefala Sydney Journals reviews
- “Sydney Journals (2008) and Late Journals (2022) showcase Kefala’s distinctive, cosmopolitan vision. They are, among other things, wonderful Sydney documents, capturing the city’s changing moods and forms through charged, astute, visually rich observation…While the loss of community attendant on migration is felt in Kefala’s Late Journals, this work highlights a different, sustaining kinship: the artists and intellectuals Kefala engages with, their presence and their work serving to enrich her days. There is wonderful generosity in Kefala’s acknowledgment of the creative work that matters to her, and a sense of celebration in her intransigent faith in the value and power of art.” (Judges of the Patrick White Literary Award)
- “In poetry as in prose, Antigone Kefala has made the fragment her form. It’s a form that embodies both salvage and destruction, and it’s wonderfully deployed in Late Journals to snatch moments from time while testifying to discontinuity and loss. I couldn’t stop reading this book. It bears moving witness to a distinctive, cosmopolitan vision and an unwavering faith in the power and integrity of art.” (Michelle de Kretser)
- “The best Australian writer you’ve never heard of.” (The Berliner)
Sydney Journals
- Author: Antigone Kefala (Australia)
- Book type: diary from 2009
- Publisher: Transit Books
- Released: March 26, 2026
- Length: 216 pages
- Format: paperback / ebook
- Prize: $ 18.95
- Order book from: Amazon / Bol
Blurb of the Sydney Journals by Antigone Kefala
A thirty-year diary that became a groundbreaking literary project.
Antigone Kefala has long been considered one of Australia’s best kept secrets. Born in Romania in 1931, she and her family were forced to flee following the occupation by the Soviet Union, escaping first to refugee camps in Greece before moving to New Zealand and then finally Australia in 1959, where she lived until her death.
As she grew into her career as a writer, she situated herself within Sydney’s artistic and intellectual milieu, publishing poetry and fiction. She also kept a diary for over thirty years, portraying a world sustained by conversation and friendship, and by reflection, on books and paintings, plays and films, and literary fortune.
For Kefala, Sydney Journals was a literary project, culled from decades of recordkeeping and shaped by austere and frank observations that beam with poignancy and humor. What is left is a rare document of the domestic and public life of the period, of an aging writer and her companions, and the dramatic beauty of the city and its landscapes.
Intimate in its recollections, social in nature, the Journals establishes Antigone Kefala as one of literature’s great diarists.
Antigone Kefala was born May 28, 1931 into a family of musicians in Brăila, Romania, and aspired to be an actor. Following the occupation by the Soviet Union, her family fled Romania, first escaping to Greece and living in refugee camps there. She moved to New Zealand before arriving in Sydney in 1959, where she lived until her death. A poet, novelist, and diarist, she has been described as “one of the most significant of the Australian writers who have come from elsewhere” and a “cultural visionary,” mapping the experiences of exile, displacement, and otherness. She died December 3, 2022 in Sydney Australia the age of 91.
