I’m collaborating on a multimedia music theatre piece with Greek composer Michalis Paraskakis. Field Guide [to the Lost Flower] is based on my poetry from the collection Field Guide to the Lost Flower of Crete (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2021). The premiere will be on Saturday June 7, 2025, at Subset Festival / Athens Epidaurus Festival. The work weaves together music, text, video, theater, and electronics into a unified immersive performance. At its core, the work explores abstract themes of loss and time, suggesting an unspoken yet ever-present sense of absence—whether it's the loss of a loved one or the loss of nature. The Athens Epidaurus Festival is Greece’s leading cultural organisation and one of the oldest continuously running festivals in Europe.

Michalis Paraskakis is a composer and performer. His first opera Strella was commissioned and staged for two seasons by the Greek National Opera in 2023. He has won the impuls composition competition where his piece Kāma premiered in 2017. His music has been performed in venues and festivals internationally. This will be our third collaboration.

In addition to The Field Guide of the Lost Flower of Crete, I’m also the author of three other poetry collections. Wavelengths of Your Song (MQUP, 2013) was published in German translation as Wellenlängen deines Liedes in 2020 by parasitenpresse (Cologne), in time for the Frankfurt Bookfair with Canada as the guest country. Dust Blown Side of the Journey (MQUP, 2017) was a finalist for the Eyelands Book Awards (Greece). Treading Fast Rivers (MQUP) was a finalist for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award for best first book of poetry in Canada.

I’ve been honoured with the Alfred G. Bailey Prize, the National Broadsheet Prize, the Sheldon Currie Fiction Prize (second place), the Earle Birney Prize, and I was a Canadian Broadcasting Corporation Poetry Prize finalist in 2024, among others. Widely anthologised in the United States and Canada, my work has also been published in Best Canadian Poetry. https://eleonoreschonmaier.com/

Join us in Athens!