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This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
When did you start calling yourself a poet?
I started writing things down when I was 12, trying to use language differently. But it’s only when I was 27 and I was made redundant from my job back then that I told myself ‘I want to be a poet.’ I decided it was going to become my main job, that I was going to pay my bills with it and that my whole life was going to be poetry.
Your latest book, Heritage Aesthetics, digs into your family history and childhood - where did the urge to explore these themes come from?
When I started writing this book I had two questions: what does it mean to be Cypriot and what does it mean to be part of a protest. The book became a project where I tried to find the common ground between these two questions. And that was really going into my past, my family, my upbringing and looking to see how much of that was influenced by the way the Brits behaved with the Cypriot people after the island became part of the empire in 1878. We don’t choose what we inherit.
The poem that gives the title to the book asks ‘Why have ideas become so important?’. Why have they?
Everything starts as an idea. And when you have an idea you have a language for that idea that you can use to convince other people to follow that idea. And it can become dangerous depending on whose expense that idea is. There are always real life implications of that idea. And I’m not trying to divide between good and bad ideas, I’m trying to bring them together.
Your role models (in literature as well as in the real world)
I have a lot of heroes, some of them aren’t great people but they are really good at what they do. My first models when I got into poetry were Pablo Neruda, Miguel Hernandez, Federico Garcia Lorca and a lot of the Spanish writers. My grandma is a hero too. Usually the people I learn from are the people who surprise me, the people who think differently and do things differently. I’m attracted to people who have vision and live non-conformist lives.
Do you remember what was the first poem you ever felt proud of?
The first poem I was really proud of was called Anthropos, which means ‘man’ in Greek, and it was for a competition on the theme of respect. I was 17 and I remember reading it to the girl I was going out with at the time and her saying ‘How do you do that? How do you take words that we use everyday and make something beautiful?’ The poem did win the competition and I ended up thinking, that maybe there was really something there. Since then, I started writing all the time.
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