Angela Costi – January 5 2020

Angela is a freelance poet, playwright, dramaturge and community artist. She has written seven plays and four collections of poetry. Her poems, stories, essays and plays have been widely published, broadcast and produced in Australia and internationally. Born in Australia to Cypriot parents, Angela’s heritage and ancestry inspires much of her work. In 1993, Angela received a travel award from the National Languages and Literacy Board of Australia to study Classic Greek theatre in Greece and perform an adaptation of an ancient Greek play in Greek amphitheatres. Since her return to Australia, Angela’s plays have been staged, published and broadcast and she received a National Award for innovation and excellence in community services in 2002 for the Relocated Arts project, for which she was the commissioned playwright. In 2009, Angela received funding from the Australia Council for the Arts to travel to Japan and work on an international collaboration involving her poetry and Japan-based Stringraphy Ensemble.

Lost in Mid-Verse
Owl Publishing, 2014; ISBN 9780977543323
Part of Owl Publishing’s chapbook series, Angela’s fourth collection of poetry aims to ‘showcase the diversity of poetry by emerging and established Greek-Australian poets’. Lost in Mid-Verse contains an introduction by writer and visual artist Peter Lyssiotis and seven poems spanning just fourteen pages.
“Costi’s style is direct, concise and penetrating. She writes with a beautiful economy and possesses a talent for subtle suggestion and quiet irony. Although she usually organises her poems using stanzas and employs traditional poetic elements such as metaphor, simile, imagery and allusion, she largely eschews rhyme and formality, creating a personal poetics that is neither traditional nor experimental.” – Nathanael O’Reilly

Honey and Salt
Five Islands Press, 2007; ISBN 9780734037466
This is a poet who can indulge in fun, the sensations of good food, the luxury of loving memories, rich impressions of childhood – but also, in poems that will not leave the reader, invoke the hardships of generations.
“Her collection, Honey & Salt, is filled with sensual, languid poems addressing her identity as a Cypriot Australian and unpacking its contrasts.” – Briohny Doyle, Cordite Review