Shortlisted for the Best Poetry Collection “Jean Moréas” Award 2024

2025 State Poetry Prize

In her fourth collection, Lamia, Kotoula cultivates a new humanism and compassion. The human condition, national language and consciousness, the economic and socio-political crisis, the plight of vulnerable groups such as political refugees and war victims, gender equality, and a newly enlightened feminism typically form the core of her poetry. Recasting moments from everyday interactions with her daughter as poems — “subtly transforming private demons into a public resonance,” as A. E. Stallings masterfully had put it — Kotoula reflects on fundamental conditions of human existence such as life and death, the limitations of time, sorrow and mourning, courage, resilience and pain, creativity and memory, hope and joy, illuminating all dimensions of the human experience.

Writing in an evocative dialogue with leading poets from a centuries-long tradition, such as Constantine Cavafy and Kostis Palamas, Kotoula, in Lamia as well, “brings fresh language and a feminine touch to familiar themes” (Karen Van Dyck, Austerity Measures, New York Review of Books).