MANI LIT FEST
Emma Cowell Emma is based in Greece with her husband, Tony who is also a writer. A former actress and BBC presenter, segueing from being paid to talk for a living into writing was a natural progression, since storytelling has been at the heart of her career to date. Outside of work, Emma is a keen angler and is attempting to improve her Greek language skills . . . she is yet to achieve a level of proficiency outside of tavernas and bakeries.
Carol McGrath Following a first degree in English and History, Carol McGrath completed an MA in Creative Writing from The Seamus Heaney Centre, Queens University Belfast, followed by an MPhil in English from University of London. She is published by Headline. The Handfasted Wife, first in a trilogy about the royal women of 1066 was shortlisted for the RoNAS in 2014. The Swan-Daughter and The Betrothed Sister complete this highly acclaimed trilogy. Mistress Cromwell, a best-selling historical novel about Elizabeth Cromwell, wife of Henry VIII’s statesman, Thomas Cromwell, was republished by Headline in 2020. The Silken Rose, first in a Medieval She-Wolf Queens Trilogy, featuring Ailenor of Provence, saw publication in April 2020. This was followed by The Damask Rose. The Stone Rose was published April 2022. The Stolen Crown 2023 and July 2024 The Lost Queen about Berengaria of Navarre and The Third Crusade. She is currently writing a sequel to Mistress Cromwell. Carol writes Historical non-fiction as well as fiction. Sex and Sexuality in Tudor England was published in February 2022 by Pen & Sword. She frequently speaks at Conferences and gives podcast interviews.
Find Carol on her website: www.carolcmcgrath . Sign up for her regular newsletter using the relevant home page drop down.
Deborah Swift Deborah Swift is the English author of twenty historical novels, including Millennium Award winner Past Encounters, and The Lady's Slipper, shortlisted for the Impress Prize.
Recent books include the Renaissance series based around the life of the poisoner Giulia Tofana, The Poison Keeper and its sequels.
For Harper Collins her latest books are a series set in WW2, the most recent being The Enemy's Wife set in wartime Shangai.
Deborah used to work as a set and costume designer for theatre and TV and enjoys the research aspect of creating historical fiction, something she loved doing as a scenographer.
Jenny Barden trained as an artist then switched to law and qualified as a solicitor. She worked for one of the leading firms of company-commercial lawyers in the City of London before a chance encounter with a painting triggered a passion for writing. Journeys to South and Central America led to an interest in the Age of Discovery and eventually to two novels published by Ebury Press/Penguin Random House. She has written for magazines and non-fiction publications and been shortlisted for several national awards. She is a director of the Historical Novel Society and is represented by Jonathan Pegg in the UK. She is currently working on a thriller set at the time of the Spanish Armada.
Peter Hughes is a poet and visual artist based in Umbria, Italy. His poems include distinctive versions of classic Italian texts, including work by Petrarch, Cavalcanti and Leopardi. He has been the Judith E. Wilson Poetry Fellow at Cambridge University. His poetry publications include a Selected Poems (Shearsman, 2013). Other books include Quite Frankly – after Petrarch’s Sonnets (Reality Street, 2015), Cavalcanty (Carcanet, 2017), via Leopardi 21 (Equipage, 2017), A Berlin Entrainment (Shearsman, 2019), Arrangements (Aquifer, 2022, with Eléna Rivera), The Modulus of Rupture (Shearsman, 2023), Lent (Equipage 2024) and Drawn (Broken Sleep Books, 2025).
Kelvin Corcoran lives in Greece. His first book was published in 1985 and his Collected Poems in 2023, drawing upon the fifteen books published subsequently. His work has been commended by the Poetry Society and the Forward Prize committee. It is the subject of a study edited by Andy Brown, The Writing Occurs as Song. Corcoran has edited an account of Lee Harwood’s poetry in Not the Full Story: Six Interviews with Lee Harwood, 2008. He is co-editor with Robert Sheppard of the New Collected Poems of Lee Harwood and editor of About Poetry, 2026, a collection of Peter Riley’s essays and interviews. Corcoran’s most recent publications include the libretto Under Tainaron, 2025, and Transparent Blue of Everything, 2026. His work has been anthologised in the UK and the USA and translated into Greek.
Jon Thompson Jon Thompson is a poet, professor emeritus, editor and essayist. He has published five full-length collections of poems, the latest of which is The Distances (2024). He has also published a collection of lyrical essays on American culture, After Paradise. His most recent project, Camera Obscura, is hybrid memoir of photographs, prose and prose poems. His editing projects include founding the online journal, Free Verse: A Journal of Contemporary Poetry & Poetics, and the poetry series, Free Verse Editions and Illuminations, a series on American poetics. He now divides his time between the U.S. and Greece.
Live Poets' Society
Under Tainaron recasts elements of the myths of Orpheus and Eurydice and is rooted in the locations where that mythology originated. It also explores the relevance of such myths to our present world and the fate of those cast into the underworld and whether their rescue is considered. Under Tainaron is also about the Orphic power of music and poetry to move us and see things anew.
Orpheus - Kelvin Corcoran
Eurydice - Theresa Stoker
Chorus of Orphans – Jayne Hooper and Mary Menis
Refugee - Melanie Warnes
Chorus of Spooks - Mat Dean
Home Secretary - Mat Dean
Music composed and performed by The Live Poets:
Ben Blant - Baklamaki and Sound Effects
Paula Forney - Keyboards
Stavroula Cheilia - Percussion
Tino Vassilopulos - Synthesizer
Brenda Grate is a certified Practical Herbalist, holistic health coach, and author who lives in a stone house on the Mani peninsula with her husband Chad. Her first herbal book, The Mediterranean Herbalist: Stories and Herbal Remedies from Italy and Greece, will be released in fall 2026 by Book Shelter. The book blends memoir, plant medicine, and the herbal traditions of the Mediterranean, drawn from years of living and practicing in Greece and Italy. Brenda is also the author of four novels, including The Invisible Girl. Alongside her writing, she works one-on-one with clients, guiding them through plant-based protocols rooted in constitutional assessment and ancestral wisdom. She has ghostwritten more than fifteen nonfiction books through her business Grate Writes. Find her at mugwortandmeadow.com, where she publishes the monthly Herbal Letters.
Klaas Spekken
Klaas Spekken is from Holland. He got his degree in singing and singing teacher, from the conservatory in Alkmaar. For several years he was part of several musical productions. In the year 2000 he moved back to the province Groningen, where he was born. For 25 years he had a career in singing Gronings, the dialect he grew up with. From 2019 he had an important program for the LHBTIQ+ community, and played this everywhere in Holland. Last year Klaas retired abd followed his dream living in Greece.
Andrea Roach. Born in the United Kingdom, Andrea Kim Roach lived in Italy for twenty-five years before settling in Western Mani in 2020, where she now resides with her husband. Though an engineer by profession, she has moved effortlessly between the worlds of painting, sculpture, and writing since childhood. Earlier this year, she published her debut book, Poseidon Road—a tapestry of short stories inspired by the stark beauty of the Mani landscape, where she seamlessly weaves imagination into reality.
Steve Potter is a psychotherapist living in London and the author of three books on psychotherapy (the most recent being Therapy with a Voice www.mapandtalk.com co-authored with Lucy Cutler). He has been going to a creative writing group for the past ten years and uses exercises in self-discovery writing (by and for clients) within and between sessions in his therapy work. He is a past chairperson of the International Cognitive Analytic Therapy Association and has taught therapy methods and skills in many countries and frequently in Greece. He has been coming twice a year to Kardamyli and Stoupa since 2006 and loves the Mani Lit Fest and Patriko Cafe for its humanity and creativity.
Mike Heath is a former history teacher and erstwhile long term resident of Stoupa. He is the author of ”Annie Williams: Last of a Fenland Dynasty” and “Pumpkins, Silly Boy, Pumpkins: A Fan’s Appreciation of the Rolling Stones”. Both still available.
Mike is Mani Lit Fest's regular quiz master and has also written and delivered many quizzes which have raised thousands of euros for other various local charities/organisations.
Pandora Bethea was born in Athens, Greece and grew up in Iran until the age of ten. She received her high school diploma from the American Community School of Athens (ACS). Because she was surrounded by many cultures, languages and tradition, multiculturalism is her comfort zone. At the age of 26, she flew to New York and travelled cross-country with her friend Fani to San Francisco. She received her degree in English Language and Literature from Sonoma State University and taught in California public high schools for years discovering young poets in her classroom. She loved being a part of the poet community in San Francisco Bay. Pandora's poetry has been published in "Healdsburg Haiku" by Running Wolf Press, in "The Peace Press" of Sonoma County, in "The Sitting Room" annual publication, in "A Word for All Seasons" Benicia Poets Anthology, and California Poets in the Schools Anthology. As a world traveller, she has experienced many countries, including Arctic Greenland, Hungary, Croatia, Guatemala, Morocco, Vietnam, India, Iran, Dubai, Denmark, the U.S. and Europe, but her favourite spot is the family summer cottage on the Aegean in northern Evia. She is the proud mother of her adult children, daughter Maya and son Alexander Sibley, and yiayia (grandmother) to babies Iris and Luna Gaertner.
Albert Robertson is a retired Police Detective Inspector who went on to enjoy a second career in Paramedicine. He has a long-standing connection with Greece and the Mani Peninsula, where he has spent more than twenty years exploring the Peloponnese, often returning to the same villages, archaeological sites and mountain roads in every season, building the local knowledge that forms the foundation of his recent self published book “Sparta 300. The Ultimate Road Trip through the Southern Peloponnese”.
His passion for the history, culture and dramatic landscapes of this remarkable region has also inspired him to document its unique character through photography and drone imagery, helping to preserve and share its beauty with others.
Living between Kalamata and West Mani, Albert continues to explore southern Greece and is committed to encouraging others to discover its rich heritage and hidden treasures. Sparta 300 is his first published travel guide.
Theresa Stoker (Festival Organiser) has won competitions in various genres including theatre, short story and travel writing. Her travel pieces have appeared in the Telegraph Just Back travel section and been published in indie magazines. She is very proud of being part of Write Club The Podcast for 2 years and 100 episodes. In 2020 she was interviewed by French filmmaker Sonia Dauger for a documentary about author Marguerite Yourcenar for the ARTE TV channel.
Melanie Wicks (Festival Organiser) has lived in the Mani for over 20 years and during that time has played the violin in various local bands, started a local theatre group along with Theresa Stoker, and co-created the Mani Lit Fest with Theresa Stoker and Carol McGrath in 2018. She also designed and maintains this website for Mani LIt Fest.
Melanie is an aspiring writer and has so far produced a few short stories and is in the early stages of writing a novel set in Greece. Read her ghost story 'Miroloi' (set in the Mani) in our Lit Fest Library
Pat Woolfe (host of Open Mic) is a retired English and drama teacher from Manchester, who now spends most of the year in Stoupa, where she lives with her husband Mike, and numerous cats.
She is one of the founder members of Write Club the Podcast, where she says she finally had the chance to develop some of the stories inspired by characters, situations, snippets of conversation she had been mentally filing away for future reference. Her previous literary efforts were often in response to the need to provide drama material for students, or members of the Youth Theatre she ran, and included several short plays. More recently, she has produced a number of short stories, often with just a hint of darkness, one of which won the 1st prize in the 2019 Mani Lit Fest Short Story competition.