New Release
Fireworks under the sun
A poetic composition, in fragments. A real journey through the city takes on non-linear dimensions, linking movement with thought, and personal experience with the collective. Fireworks Under the Sun, poems by the prose writer Maria A. Ioannou, attempts to sketch those unilluminated and suspended moments that define what it might mean to be a human being, a woman, a body, a country, time, in a strangely familiar world that seems to belong nowhere.
Author:
Maria A. Ioannou
Date of publication:
22/06/2026
Pages:
128
Dimensions:
17 Χ 24
ISBN:
978-960-572-848-9
Publication:
2026
Categories:
Literature, Books, Poetry
[...] writes without the impression that she is "performing a rite"—a romantic fantasy or a modernist leftover that characterizes many poets. Yet her poetry becomes neither frivolous nor superficial. On the contrary, this carefree attitude, this lack of a sense of danger, allows her to experiment in her poems with things that her "rite-performing" peers would avoid or never even think of. And every stylistic innovation invariably leads to a depth or a height, carrying us into a new plane of meaning so as to broaden the spectrum of polyphony. After all, this carefree spirit proves to be programmatic—a settled, deliberate approach to handling composition. [...]
– Panayotis Vouzis, Culture BookCondensed writing, the words of an observer of the world—Ioannou, I believe, has written her most mature book yet, one that leaves you with a lingering sense of unfulfilled suspense.
– Konstantia Sotiriou, Alpha NewsMaria A. Ioannou
Maria A. Ioannou was born in Limassol in 1982. She has published three collections of short stories: The Giant Fall of an Eyelash (Gavriilidis Publications, 2011 – Cyprus State Prize for New Writer), Cauldron (Nefeli Publications, 2015 – shortlisted for the Klepsydra Magazine Young Writer Award), and The Intermediates (Nefeli Publications, 2022 – Cyprus State Prize for Short Story/Novella, shortlisted in the Prose category for the Chartis Magazine Awards). She has also written two books for children: The Fly and the Jug (illustrated by Philippos Theodorides, Patakis Publications, 2019) and My Mom Is an Astronaut (illustrated by Vasilis Koutsogiannis, Teleia Publications, 2023). She studied English literature at Reading and completed her Master’s thesis and PhD on 20th-century literature and creative writing at King’s College London and the University of Winchester, respectively. Her micro-fiction stories were nominated for Best Small Fictions 2020 in the US and Best of the Net 2021. In 2013, she founded the international interdisciplinary literature festival "Sardam."
