In May, our Spotlight is Eleonora Kouneni who has kindly agreed to let us share her poem "Before the Fall".
Originally from Greece, Eleonora Kouneni is a jazz vocalist, actress, writer and photographer based in London. After completing her degree in English Literature at the University of Athens, she moved to London to chase her passion for music, only to acquire an array of new passions along the way. In 2014, she was introduced to Spoken Word by a friend and colleague at the pub where she used to work. She instantly fell in love with what she found to be an incredibly freeing form of art, and started attending his weekly spoken word events as an audience member. She did that for years before attempting to perform her own poems. During the first lockdown, Eleonora got back into writing after a few years of inactivity; she wrote a screenplay, an experimental short story and a collection of poems that she wishes to one day publish. She has since kept writing poems and performing them at zoom open-mic events, impatiently waiting for the real thing to come back.
Having recently realised that the subject matter of most of her writing had been politics and social issues - a perfectly acceptable way of avoiding to deal with the various unresolved feelings that had piled up over the years - Eleonora made it one of this year’s resolutions to be more vulnerable and delve a bit deeper within herself, as a way of processing loss and examining the scars it’s left behind. Her poem “Before the fall” is an almost-ten-years-too-late post-mortem on a relationship that defined her.
You can visit Eleonora's website here.