Third Person (singular):

Dr Helen Ramoutsaki is a poet, performance poet, writer, storyteller and educator living in Australia’s far north. For over twenty years in Tropical North Queensland, she has performed at community events, folk festivals, writers’ festivals and in theatres. She is as much in her element at poets’ breakfasts and slams as she is in staged and directed dramatic works. Helen co-ordinated and compered the popular monthly ‘Poetry and Pasta’ event in Mossman for eight years and in 2010 wrote, directed and performed in a fringe theatre production entitled Mapping the Heart, based on her poetry and song lyrics.

Helen was the winner of Prole Magazine’s “2011 Prole Laureate” competition. In 2012 she won the Woodford Folk Festival’s ‘One minute poets’ brawl’ with a swooping sonnet. In 2013 she one of six contenders for ABC Radio National’s wildcard entry to the Australian Poetry Slam final in Sydney.

As a celebration of Queensland’s Wet Tropics World Heritage Area, Helen’s performance project, Wet: an appetite for the tropics, blends live poetry with photographic images in a narrative frame. Poems, image sequences and narrative blocks are designed to be arranged and rearranged in textual tessellations to suit particular performance situations.

Helen’s style is eclectic, embracing a range of poetic genres to suit a mood or occasion. The poems you find on this site are samples of works, some spanning back years, that are meant to be read or performed. However, many of her performances pieces are best experienced live and do not appear here.

Dr Helen Ramoutsaki has a PhD from James Cook University, where she is an Adjunct Research Associate. She holds a Bachelor of Learning Management and a Bachelor of Arts (Honours) First Class in English Literature from CQUniversity.

 Life is simply a complex of paradoxes