Sea Trouble
What Moved the Judges
“This poetic exploration to ambient sounds of nature, holds a powerful mirror that reflects the irony of how we are engaged in brinkmanship on the issue of peace, forgetting that there are urgent issues like water policies, and the severe threat of species loss.”
“Water policies intertwine with the rhythms and flows of our existence—much like painting and other forms of art—shaping not only the landscapes we inhabit but the very essence of our lives. Through lyrical exploration, I aim to weave together the tangible and the intangible, reflecting on our relationship with this vital resource while advocating for its sustainable stewardship.”
Through complex poetic prose and atmospheric soundscapes, Maroula carries the listener on a multisensorial journey that confronts the violence humans enact on marine worlds. As our editors observed, the piece is built from “metaphoric constructions [that] are both complex and vivid, taking the listener through the cosmocide of the oceans—through pollution, navigation, and the lack of human empathy, solidarity, and knowledge toward marine life.”
Heartbreaking in its honesty, the work nevertheless seeks to mobilize empathy, challenging dominant notions of alterity and urging a deeper reckoning with our relationship to oceanic life. While the author reflects on how peace with animals and other-than-human beings may still feel distant, the piece ultimately holds space for hope, as we search for a shared path forward, grounded in what we hold in common as deep, sensing beings.
Maroula Blades is a multidisciplinary artist who lives in Berlin. She was awarded 2nd place for the 2023 German Amadeu Antonio Prize for her interdisciplinary educational project, Stones in Symphony. In 2023, she was awarded a novella in-progress grant from the UK Society of Authors Foundation and the K. Blundell Trust as well as a project grant from the Jan Michalski Foundation for Writing and Literature. She was selected for the 2021 INITIAL Special Grant from the Academy of Arts in Berlin. In 2020, Chapeltown Books released her story collection The World in an Eye. Her works were published in The Caribbean Writer, Bacopa Literary Review, Mukoli, Ake Review, Abridged Magazine, The London Reader, and others. She conducts bilingual poetry workshops in Berlin schools and high schools. Her multimedia projects have been presented at many international literary festivals in Germany, i.e., the Berlin International Poetry Festival, Humboldt Forum, Literature House Berlin, Literary Colloquium Berlin, Brecht House, and Lit-Cologne.