The Festival Founders
Annabelle Louvros
Annabelle was first introduced to Greece as a child in the 60s, when her mother was contracted to take photographs for the then emerging Greek tourism industry. Returning on holiday in the 80s, her love affair with Corfu truly blossomed and was sealed for life during her time working and living on the island. Annabelle, a Londoner, has worked in the art publishing, catering and property industries but is most inspired by working with communities and on projects outside the traditional commercial sectors.
Involved with school governance, subsidised housing and green space regeneration, she has long wished to transfer her energies and passions to realise and promote aspects of Corfu’s existing array of riches to a wider audience and introduce new visitors to the place she loves. Annabelle’s aim is that a celebration of the arts, both local and invited from elsewhere, in this special and beautiful place, will attract attention to Corfu in an unexpected, different and unique way.
Alex Preston
Alex Preston is the prize-winning author of four novels, most recently the critically acclaimed Winchelsea. Alex appears regularly on BBC Radio and television. He writes for The Telegraph, Harper’s Bazaar and The Economist as well as for the Observer’s New Review. Alex nurtures a deep and abiding love of Greece and Corfu. He is a long-distance runner and swimmer and traversed the Hellespont as part of the Year of Troy celebrations in 2018 and is planning to undertake the Albania to Corfu swim as soon as we can sign him up. His work is published in Greek by Papadopoulos Publishing and Alex has written a regular monthly column for Epsilon Magazine in Athens.
Nikos Louvros
Nikos Louvros (12 Jan 1947 – 18 Jan 2021) was born in Corfu Town, and co-founded CricketCorfu and the Corfu Literary Festival with his wife, Annabelle. Niko was a passionate chef, traveller, event organiser and travel consultant and lived in London for many years, never losing his affection for his home island, describing the UK as his lover but Kerkyra as his mother.
In recent difficult years, and with growing concerns over the un-sustainability of hyper tourism, Niko devoted his time to encouraging and supporting local cultural bodies and enthusiasts to develop their existing offers and charms to the wider travelling world, and to work together and encourage a fresh cohort of visitors to the island, whilst also providing alternative potential to Corfiots themselves. There is a place for seaside holidays but Corfu is so much more – and her music, art, literature, sporting opportunities, history and food heritage, along with her natural riches and environment, need care, time protection and attention, so that all may enjoy and benefit from them.
Ambassador Patrons
Corfu Literary Festival, started as a small-scale labour of love, has already grown into something more serious and wonderful. One of the things that makes the Festival so special is the way that it has harnessed diverse energies whose common theme is a love of Corfu, great books and the good life. We recognised that, particularly with Niko now gone, we needed to think a lot about the future, identity and legacy of the Festival that goes beyond the two of us.
We decided to create a board of ambassador patrons and approached four inspirational women who had already embraced the CLF, have been nothing other than supportive and, critically, understand the Festival’s aims and soul. Each quite brilliant, they will push us forward and make us laugh.
Sarah Churchwell is Professor in American Literature and Chair of Public Understanding of the Humanities at the School of Advanced Study, University of London, where she directs the Being Human Festival, the UK’s national festival of the humanities. She is the author of The Wrath to Come: Gone with the Wind and The Lies America Tells; Careless People: Murder, Mayhem and The Invention of The Great Gatsby; Behold, America: A History of America First and the American Dream; and The Many Lives of Marilyn Monroe, most recently adapted into a 2022 CNN/BBC series narrated by Jessica Chastain.
Her journalism has appeared widely in international newspapers and periodicals, including the Washington Post, New York Times, Financial Times, Guardian and many others, focusing especially upon American culture, history, and politics. She has also frequently contributed to television, documentary film, and radio, with appearances including Question Time, Newsnight, Sky News, BBC Breakfast and numerous appearances across all channels. She was co-winner of the 2015 Eccles British Library Writer’s Award, named by Prospect magazine one of the world’s Top Fifty Thinkers in 2020, and longlisted for the Orwell Prize for Journalism in 2021.
Danai Dragonea is an award-winning author, journalist, and co-founder of the organization Every Single Story, dedicated to women’s storytelling and amplifying female voices. Her novel The Island of Rain – A Secret Diary received the 2023 Debut Author Award for books for children and young adults from the Greek Section of IBBY (International Board on Books for Young People). The same novel also won the 2023 Young Adult Fiction Award from the Public Bookstores (Public Book Awards). She has delivered talks on female identity and gender stereotypes, while Every Single Story’s podcast As Long as It Lasts, I’ll Be Here! received special mention at the 64th Thessaloniki International Film Festival. In October 2024, her new book The Island That Travels Through Time was published by Dioptra Editions. CLF is delighted to have Danai, a daughter of the isle, as part of the team.
Julian Hoffman is a writer and naturalist, and is the author of Irreplaceable, The Small Heart of Things and Notes from Near and Far, his blog on the nature of place. Born in northeast England, he grew up in Ontario and moved with his wife in 2000 to a mountain village beside the Prespa Lakes in northwestern Greece, a trans-boundary Balkan park whose lake basin is shared with Albania and North Macedonia. Home to a remarkably rich range of people, birds, wild flowers, languages, mammals and habitats, including the world’s largest colony of Dalmatian pelicans, Prespa is a place that has taught Julian a great deal about our complex yet indelible connections to landscape and the natural world.
Irreplaceable: The Fight to Save Our Wild Places, celebrates those imperilled places that are increasingly vanishing from the world, exploring treasured woodlands, prairies, marshlands, urban allotments and coral reefs, along with the many species under threat in them. Just as importantly though, it’s a book about resistance to loss and the countless stories of local communities and conservationists as they set about to protect and preserve what is not only of crucial importance to the fabric of human life but irreplaceable as well. Irreplaceable was a Royal Geographical Society Book of the Year and the Highly Commended Finalist for the 2020 Wainwright Prize for Writing on Global Conservation.
Elena Karoumpi has been professionally active in the fields of Hospitality, Food Service, Conference & Event Planning in the U.K., Thailand and Greece for 30 years. Co-owner of Olive Retreat Acharavi Villas, Corfu, she is also a Real Estate Broker She is elected Council Member and Member of the Women Entrepreneurship Committee of Corfu Chamber of Commerce, Vice-President of the Department of Small and Medium Sized Companies and is a Member of both Gender Equality Consultation Committees for the Region of Ionian Islands and has participated in various seminars on gastronomy, entrepreneurship, tourism and sustainable materials management. Elena is an active member of Soroptimist International Greece, an NGO promoting women empowerment and supporting women and children rights. She holds a Master’s Degree in Tourism Planning and Development from Surrey University and a Bachelor Degree in English & American Literature from Aristotle University, Thessaloniki and speaks four languages.
Gail Lynch has worked in various roles in UK publishing since 1984, including at BBC Books, Picador, Chatto & Windus, Jonathan Cape, Granta Books, Heinemann, HarperCollins, Frances Lincoln and Oneworld. She is now a freelance consultant working with independent publishers and is Managing Director and co-owner of illustrated book publisher Pimpernel Press and a board director at children’s publisher Otter-Barry Books. Gail has been having a long affair with Corfu since the early 1980s.
Sofka Zinovieff was born in London, has Russian ancestry and is deeply attached to Greece. She studied social anthropology at Cambridge, did research for her PhD in the Peloponnese and worked as a freelance journalist in Moscow and Rome. Her latest book is Putney, an explosive and thought-provoking novel about the far-reaching repercussions of an illicit relationship between a young girl and a much older man. She is also the author of a memoir, Eurydice Street: A Place in Athens and a novel set in Greece, The House on Paradise Street. Other books include Red Princess: A Revolutionary Life and The Mad Boy, Lord Berners, My Grandmother and Me. She lives between Athens and London.