FINALIST - ABLE Australian Book Launch and Expo
Winners announced 17 October 2026
Helena's first visit to Cyprus was in 1978. There are moments when she longs to be carried back to that time. Cyprus — When the Past Is Present becomes that passage. The book doesn’t simply recount her memories; it transports the reader into them, offering a sensory return to the island so vivid you feel you’re walking beside her.
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Exert from Neos Cosmos 2024
After Maria’s passing, Helena started writing to “help somehow process my thoughts and deep grief.”
“Pieces of writing started emerging not only of grief but of what it’s like closing a parent’s home and removing pieces of a loved one’s life, then selling that family home and its memories to another to take up the air my mother once breathed.”
She said there was something calling on her to continue on from her previous book about Maria – intuition.
“There was more to Maria than her painful story, there was my story that entwined as mother-daughter bond and carer.”
“I wanted to remember Maria’s last breath in detail and that night, so I wrote that painful story and to me this is not morbid.
“I hope others that read this book find something for them, I hope they cry for their own mothers or not cry because death has been accepted, and our parents want us to continue being happy amongst the living.”
Photo Literature panel at the Cyprus Diaspora Forum