Shoes with Wings

My name is Rosa and I live in the Cat Kingdom. If I had to change the world, I’m not sure what I’d  change about it. My dad says that there are two sides to every coin. The downside and the upside. If the downside is that our home is on the ground floor, then the upside is that we live in the Cat Kingdom, and that our little skylight looks out onto the road where Carlito lives. I’ll bet he’s the only nightingale in the whole world who loves cats and whom cats love back. Either that or they’ve just grown used to him. My dad ‘s name is Ares and as you’ve probably realised he’s a poet, but he doesn’t know it. Fisherman by day, poet by night. Besides me, Carlito, his poets and his boat, my dad loves cats. He comes home from sea at the crack of dawn and all the cats gather around: Rimbaud, Éluard, Sappho, Homer, Praxilla, Woolf, and Plath. By the time he’s opened his baggie of fish they’re all meowing in unison and trying to claw their way up his body. I’m sure you’ll agree with me that our cats have anything but regular cat names– my dad picked out every single one of them, and that was no easy feat.

This is how Rosa, Maria Papayanni’s latest heroine, presents her world in a brand new book, ‘Shoes with Wings’.

It is a book about poetry, little miracles, and big struggles; it’s about pursuing a Utopia. It’s a book about ordinary people who never give up dreaming of  the extraordinary; about two worlds: the real one, and the other one, which is well hidden underwater. At times it exists in our imaginations but it helps us answer some of the thousands of questions that pain and wound us. If poetry is at the forefront of the real world, then the foundation of the other world is revolution. Maria Papayanni’s writing is riddled with elements of traditional fairytales, granting her a unique tone and writing style, and even influencing the title of her new book, ‘Shoes with Wings’.