Chosen Tongue
A podcast about translingual writers and their journeys.
Episodes
My guest today is Heidi Marjamäki, a Finnish author based in Berlin. She studied in Scotland, worked in Oxford and London, and now serves as Associate Fiction Editor at Okay Donkey. Heidi's stories have appeared in ergot., Crow & Cross Keys, and others. She won the 2022 Ghost Story Supernat...
Sneha Subramanian Kanta is a poet, academic, and editor born in Mumbai and based in Mississauga, Canada. She’s the author of five chapbooks and the 2025 Woodhaven Artist in Residence at the University of British Columbia. Her collection Hiraeth, an honouree for the Bronwen Wallace Award, was published by Apple Books and Penguin Random House Canada. Her work has ...
Lidija Hilje is a Croatian writer and book coach. After earning a law degree, she spent a decade practicing in Croatian courts before transitioning to writing and coaching—this time in English, her second language. Her work has appeared in The New York Times and other publications. She lives in Zadar, Croatia, with her husband and two daughters.
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Leila Farjami is an Iranian-American poet, translator, and psychotherapist based in Los Angeles. After nearly three decades of writing in Persian, she has in recent years turned her focus to poetry in English—a shift shaped by her experiences of censorship, exile, and a search for expressive freedom.
Her work has appeared in Pl...
Vesna Main is a Croatian-born writer who has lived in London for many years and now splits her time between the UK and rural France.
Her work spans a range of forms, including the short story collection Temptation, the Goldsmiths Prize-shortlisted novel-in-dialogue Good Day?, the autofiction...
Balsam Karam is a writer and university lecturer of Kurdish heritage who has lived in Sweden since childhood. She made her literary debut in 2018 with the critically acclaimed novel Event Horizon, which was shortlisted for the Katapult Prize and won the Småland Literature Festival’s Migrant Prize. Her second novel, The Singula...
Thea Lenarduzzi is a writer, broadcaster and editor. Her debut, Dandelions, a family memoir and cultural history of migration between Italy and England, won the 2020 Fitzcarraldo Editions Essay Prize and was shortlisted for the Ackerley Prize for ‘literary autobiography of outstanding merit’. The Tower, a story about storytelling, blends history, fiction, memoir, fai...
Ani Gjika is an Albanian-born writer who moved to the U.S. when she was eighteen. She is the award-winning author and literary translator of eight books and chapbooks of poetry, among them Bread on Running Waters (Fenway Press, 2013), a finalist for the 2011 Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize and 2011 May Sarton New Hampshire Book Prize. Most recently, she is the recipient of the New Immigrant Writing Prize for her memoi...
Julie Irigaray is a French-Basque poet based in Birmingham. Her pamphlet "Wailer, Witches and Gouches" was featured on BBC Radio 4, and her work has appeared in over 60 publications, including The Realtor, Ambit and Magma. A finalist or winner in 19 poetry competitions, most recently the 2024 Bridport Prize, she also teaches creative writing at City Lit. We discussed language, identity and belonging, the loss of Julie's cultural ro...
Elizabeth Torres, known as Madam Neverstop, is a Colombian-American poet, translator, and multimedia artist residing in Denmark. With a background in Media & Film and Fine Arts from Kean University, NJ, and an MFA in Performing Arts from Den Danske Scenekunstskole, her work spans poetic journalism, artistic installations, film, soundscapes, and visual arts. She explores themes of displacement, identity, and minority re...
Sulaiman Addonia is an Eritrean-Ethiopian-British novelist. As a child, he lived in refugee camps in Sudan and Saudi Arabia. His third novel, The Seers, has been published in 2024. His first novel, The Consequences of Love, was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. In 2021 Read more
Ruben Quesada is a Costa Rican-American poet and translator based in Chicago. His latest poetry collection, Brutal Companion, winner of the Barrow Street Press Editors Prize, was published in October 2024. He edited the anthology Latinx Poetics: Essays on the Art of Poetry, which won an Independent Publisher Book Award ...
Viviana Fiorentino is an Italian poet, novelist, and translator living in Ir...
Yael van der Wouden is a writer and teacher of creative writing and comparative literature in the Netherlands. Her debut novel, The Safekeep, has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2024 and has been translated into over fourteen languages. Her essay on Dutch identity and Jewishness, "On (Not) Reading Anne Frank", has received a notable mention in The Best American Essays 2018.
We discussed the role of displacement and othern...
Pegah Ouji is an Iranian American writer who writes in Farsi and English. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming from Joyland, Epiphany, Fugue, Split Lip among others. She has been a scholarship recipient from Kundiman, Sarah Lawrence Writing Institute, Hudson Valley Writer’s Center, Literary Arts, Grub Street, and Shipman Agency. She was a 2024 Emerging Writer Fellow at Smokelong Quarterly. She is currently an editorial fellow at...
Sumitra Singam is a Malaysian-Indian-Australian writer and psychiatrist living in Melbourne. Read more
Aleksandar Hemon is the author of The Lazarus Project, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the National Book Award, as well as The Question of Bruno; Nowhere Man, Love and Obstacles, The Book of My Lives, The Making of Zombie Wars, as well as a couple of non-fiction books. His most recent novel is The World and All That It Holds (2023)
Miriam Calleja is an award-winning Maltese bilingual freelance poet, nonfiction/fiction writer, workshop leader, and translator. She is the author of three poetry collections, two chapbooks, and several collaborative works. Her poetry has been published in anthologies and in translation worldwide. She has recently been Highly Commended for a translated poem by the Stephen Spender Trust. Her latest chapbook is titled Come Closer, I ...
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