“Somewhere in the Middle” is an anthology of works by the authors who participated in the project Ulysses’ Shelter in the years 2021 and 2022, published by the Greek publishing house Thraka for Greek and Cyprian readers in the year 2022.

Ulysses’ Shelter is an international poets’, writers’, and translators’ residency programme, executed by Thraka (Greece), Sandorf (Croatia), Krokodil (Serbia), Slovene writers’ association (Slovenia), and Literature Across Frontiers (Wales). The programme has been running for four years, and during that time, 20 foreign poets stayed in Larissa for 2 weeks, and 10 Greek poets stayed in other cities, such as Ljubljana, Belgrade, and the island Mljet.

The central theme of this book is isolation – whether of physical, social, or emotional nature – actualized either as solitude, or loneliness.

All of these texts, in various ways, deal with the different forms of isolation. Another thing that they have in common is that many of these works were written during the authors’ residential stays in Larissa, Ljubljana, Mljet, and Belgrade. The anthology is named “Somewhere in the Middle”, after one of the prose texts included in the anthology, written by Marilena Papaioannou.

Authors included in the book are last year’s participants in the programme: Iakovos Anyfantakis, Eluned Gramich, Katja Grcić, Filia Kanellopoulou, Nikolas Koutsodontis, Lloyd Markham, Grug Muse, Morgan Owen, Marilena Papaioannou, Uroš Prah, Maja Ručević, Ana Svetel, Nataša Srdić, and Vitomirka Trebovac.

We hope that this book will offer you good company in a time of solitude. Reading is a solitary process because it happens while one is detached from everything around them, and immersed in another world. But despite, or maybe because of this immersion, reading is not a lonely state, because, with a book, one is never alone.