Nadia Wheatley – Charmian Clift’s Kalymnos

Launch of program for Charmian Clift’s Kalymnos: A Readers’ and Writers’
Workshop, which Nadia Wheatley will lead on the island in April 2025.

In the winter of 1954, Australian author Charmian Clift arrived on the remote and poverty-stricken Greek island of Kalymnos with her author-husband, George
Johnston, and their two young children. Clift described herself as ‘looking for a mermaid’— for something magical or mystical that would change her life.

What she found was her own unique literary voice, expressed in her first solo book, Mermaid Singing. In this memoir she recorded her observations of the island’s society of sponge divers and matriarchs, and her own adaptation to the rhythms of Kalymnian life. This authentic Greece was the change Clift was seeking. Clift’s biographer, Nadia Wheatley, will share these discoveries in a talk illustrated with archival and contemporary photographs.

Following this presentation, Limelight Arts Travel will launch the program for
Charmian Clift’s Kalymnos: A Readers’ and Writers’ Workshop (to take place on
Kalymnos in April 2025).