Antigone Kefala is often described as one of the first poets from a non-English-speaking background to make an impact on contemporary Australian poetry. Also a prose writer of some note, her writing takes up issues of language, identity, and location and can be read in the context of her background as arts administrator and her involvement in debates around the rise and demise of multicultural arts policy in Australia from the 1970s through the 1990s. Her writings and published interviews have been important in raising the issues of displacement, marginalization, equity, and access, particularly through the 1990s, a period when these issues largely dropped off the mainstream cultural agenda in Australia.

Antigone Kefala was born in Braila, Romania, on 28 May 1935. Her family had lived in Romania for three generations, her great-grandparents having migrated there from Greece and Asia Minor. She has described her family, according to Jenny Digby...