Book Signing with Greta Bellamacina

Greta Bellamacina is one such special star, whose talents promise to mesmerise JOALI guests at an exclusive poetry reading and book signing. At this highly anticipated event, Bellamacina will introduce her new book, Who Will Make The Fire, a collection of poems that employ elemental metaphors — wind and dawn, trees and fire — to explore the interior world of the author.

In addition, Bellamacina will also lead a special poetry tree ceremony for young guests and their families, together with Robert Montogomery, the renowned British contemporary artist.

About Greta Bellamacina
Greta Bellamacina is an award winning British poet, actress and filmmaker.

Her first feature film as a director ‘Hurt By Paradise’ was nominated for the prestigious Michael Powell Award for Best British Feature Film and at the Edinburgh International Film Festival, and the London Evening Standard wrote, “Bellamacina is as precise and bold as Joanna Hogg.” She recently played the lead character Irene in both of the acclaimed, avant-garde Italian film director Riccardo Vannuccini’s films, ‘Commedia’ and ‘Things And Other Things,’ and her new film ‘Tell That to the Winter Sea’ will reach cinemas in May.

In poetry she was short-listed as a Young Poet Laureate of London. Since then her poetry has gone on to be recognised internationally. The National Poetry Library commissioned three poems from Greta for their ‘Odysseys’ series, the Poetry Library’s contribution to the 2018 London Literature Festival, and her work has been published in Britain’s oldest and longest running literary periodical The London Magazine. In 2020 the renowned US publisher Andrews McMeel published her collection ‘Tomorrow’s Woman’ alongside a collection of feminist poetry she edited titled ‘SMEAR’. This saw her work reach a global audience and in the same year her ‘Collected Poems’ was translated into Spanish and published by Valparaíso Ediciones in Madrid.

The Financial Times described ‘Tomorrow’s Woman’ as ‘a beguiling, urgent, beautiful, lamenting, tender and powerful ode to the complexities of contemporary womanhood’ and Greta as a ‘cultural Trojan horse’.

About Who Will Make The Fire
‘Who Will Make The Fire’ is a deeply personal book about love, loss, nature, depression and recovery. Bellamacina employs metaphors of wind, dawn, trees and fire to explore her interior world. The wind becomes the biographer of the self, tracing this ever-evolving garden that must die, again and again, like a wild bird shedding its feathers. Touching on themes of melancholy, softness, hope and new beginnings, the collection questions what it is to really live with stillness and fire. To combat the digital world and to get back to the earth. To let the hidden circle of nature find its way back into the self.