Welcome to Owl Publishing

After thirty years of publishing (1992-2022), Owl Publishing is now winding down its activities and will only operate in selling, or giving out for research purposes, the remaining copies of its publications.

Information about each Owl publication can be found under TITLES on this website.

Any enquiries about obtaining copies can be made by emailing its founding publisher and editor, Helen Nickas at: owlbooks@bigpond.com

Below is an account of how this publisher started in 1992:

Owl Publishing is a small independent publisher founded in the nineties by Greek- Australian Helen Nickas with an aim to publish a selection of literary works by Greek-Australians. Being a multicultural country, Australia can benefit from the wide diversity of its literature, including the 'dual vision' of its hyphenated writers. Owl’s publications include poetry, prose fiction, anthologies and literary criticism. Some of Owl’s books are also published in bilingual form, aiming to cultivate and promote bilingualism, while others are monolingual (Greek, or English) depending on the target readership.

Owl publications have been reviewed in reputable Australian newspapers, journals and magazines such as The Age, The Weekend Australian, Meanjin, Meridian, Australian Book Review, Sydney Review of Books, and abroad in Journal of Modern Greek Studies, World Literature Today and others. In a review of an Owl publication, Thomas Shapcott wrote that Owl Publishing is “… an enterprise that widens horizons...” (Australian Book Review, August 2000)

While all publications can be bought, or ordered, from good shops around Australia, Owl is not commercially driven and its aim is to publish books of high quality by, and about, Greek-Australian writers at affordable prices.

Mothers from the Edge

Mothers from the Edge is an antipodean anthology about mothers and daughters, consisting of (auto)biographical fiction, fictionalised (auto)biography, memoirs, short stories, plays. These are all new works by twenty-eight women writers in Australia with a Greek background, or connection.

Read more about this book here

Fathers from the Edge: Greek-Australian reflections on fathers

Fathers from the Edge is a companion book to Mothers from the Edge (an anthology about the relationship between mothers and daughters within the Greek-Australian migrant experience).

Read more about this book here

Antigone Kefala: a writer’s journey

Antigone Kefala: a writer’s journey is edited and introduced by Vrasidas Karalis and Helen Nickas. It includes a selection of interviews, reviews and essays on the life and works of Australian poet and prose writer Antigone Kefala, as well as an illuminating autobiographical piece by the poet herself.

Read more about this book here

Dreams of Clay Drops of Dew

This publication by Dina Amanatides, which contains two hundred poems, including her very short poems known as “Scattered Thoughts”, and translated into English by Konstandina Dounis, seeks to acquaint the English-speaking readership with the beauty of her work and the wide range of her thematic preoccupations.

Read more about this book here

Athina and her Daughters: a memoir of two worlds

This memoir tells the story of a Greek mother and her five daughters, and their journey through all of the 20th century from Greece - with its rural and urban traditions, politics, occupations and civil wars - to migration in Australia where the daughters come for a better life. Through a polyphonic narrative, it lets the women speak in their own voices and tell their own stories about the impact of major events in their lives.

Read more about this book here

The Chapbook series

The aim of the series is to showcase the diversity of poetry by emerging and established Greek-Australian poets.