Chosen Tongue

Gabriella Zalapì is an artist and writer born in Milan in 1972 to an English-Italian-Swiss family, and now living in Paris. She writes in French, and her work draws on her own family history, weaving archive and memory into an unsettling interplay between fact and fiction. Her novel Ilaria, or The Conquest of Disobedience has just come out in English, translated by Adriana Hunter, and it won the P...

Kiki Petrosino is the author of several poetry collections which include Perfect Italian (2026), White Blood: A Lyric of Virginia (2020), Witch Wife (2017), Hymn for the Black Terrific (2013), and Fort Red Border (2009), and the memoir Bright (2022) all published by Sarabande Books. She holds graduate degrees from the University of Chicago and the University of Iowa Writer's Workshop. She is a Pro...

Lisa Fransson is a bilingual writer living on the south coast of England. In her native Swedish, she's an award-winning children's author, and in her adopted English she writes short fiction and novels, including her first novel, The Shape of Guilt , published by époque press. She also works as a literary translator and mentor to young writers, and writes the Substack This Writing Life . We talk a...

Sarp Sözdinler is a Turkish writer based in Amsterdam. His work has appeared in Electric Literature, Kenyon Review, Shenandoah, Wigleaf, Flash Frog, Pithead Chapel, Fractured Lit, and Maudlin House, among other journals, and his stories have been finalists for the Los Angeles Review Short Fiction Prize and the Passages North Waasnode Short Fiction Prize, with work selected or nominated for the Pus...

Ayşegül Savaş is the author of the novels  Walking on the Ceiling , White on White , and The Anthropologists , which was a TIME , New Yorker , Vanity Fair , Elle , and Kirkus best book of the year and one of Barack Obama's favorite books of 2024. Her short story collection Long Distance was a finalist for the Story Prize. Originally from Istanbul, she lives in Paris. We talk about why she started...

Nina Chayka is a Russian-American writer with a BA from Harvard, where she's currently pursuing a PhD. We talk about her move to the US in high school and the deliberate push she made into English, setting herself a rule to use it as much as possible even when its grammar felt rigid next to Russian. She talks about her debut story collection, Seagulls , voices of exile after the war in Ukraine, an...

Aaron Poochigian is a poet and translator with a PhD in classics from the University of Minnesota and an MFA in poetry from Columbia University. He is the author of the poetry collection  American Divine and the verse tour Four Walks in Central Park. His translations for Penguin Classics and W.W. Norton include Saffo's Stang with Love and Marcos Aurelio's Meditations. We talk about what it means t...

Chiara Barzini is an Italian author and award-winning screenwriter best known for her debut English-language novel,  Things That Happened Before the Earthquake , and her nonfiction work Aqua: A History of Water and Lost Dreams . Born in Rome, she moved to California at fifteen, and her writing has appeared in Vogue, Harper's, Rolling Stone, and Vice. Her screenplay for the film Arianna was nominat...

David Hoon Kim is a Korean-born American educated in France, who took his first creative writing workshop at the Sorbonne before attending the Iowa Writers' Workshop, the Stegner Program, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. His fiction has appeared in The New Yorker as well as French-language publications including Brins d'éternité and XYZ La revue de la nouvelle , and he writes in both...

  Valeria Luiselli  is an acclaimed writer of both fiction and nonfiction. She is the author of the essay collection  Sidewalks ; the novels  Faces in the Crowd  and  The Story of My Teeth ; and, most recently,  Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions  and the international bestseller  Lost Children Archive . She is the recipient of a MacArthur "Genius Grant," and the winner of two Los An...

Hoangmai (Mai) Pham is a Vietnamese American physician, memoirist, and former Chief Innovation Officer for Medicare and Medicaid. At six, she fled Saigon with her family at the end of the war and arrived in America with a new language to learn and a life to rebuild. Her memoir,  Bridge from Saigon , shortlisted for the International Beverly Prize for Literature, is out now. In this episode, we tal...

Vanessa Fabiano grew up in Switzerland, the daughter of immigrants, speaking six languages before she ever thought of herself as a writer. She studied East Asian Studies at Columbia, first traveled to China in 1994, and was back there working during the SARS outbreak in 2002. She's built a parallel life in brand strategy and communications, co-founded a literary nonprofit, and curated an internati...

Ova Ceren writes bittersweet tales of heartbreak and magic, often inspired by Turkish and Ottoman folklore. Blessed (or perhaps cursed) with a mathematical brain, she earned a degree in Computer Science and a master's that led her into a career in IT, taking her from Türkiye to Britain. After years of wrestling with algorithms in corporate jungles, she finally eloped with a debut novel instead. Ov...

Sophie Lewis is a London-born translator and editor. Working from French and Portuguese, she has translated books by Marcel Aymé, Josephine Baker, Hélène Cixous, Annie Ernaux, Violette Leduc, Noémi Lefebvre, Nastassja Martin, Françoise Sagan, Leïla Slimani, Stendhal and Jules Verne; also Victor Heringer, Patrícia Melo, Sheyla Smanioto and Micheliny Verunschk, among others. For six years she was pr...

Costanza Casati was born in Texas and raised in Northern Italy. She holds an MA in Writing from the University of Warwick and has worked as a screenwriter and journalist. Her debut novel, Clytemnestra , sold into more than twenty territories worldwide and won the Goldsboro Books Glass Bell Award, while her second novel, Babylonia , was an instant Sunday Times bestseller and the winner of the Wilbu...

Gonzalo Ceron Garcia was born in Santiago and spent his first years in Chile's Colchagua Valley region, before moving to Switzerland and eventually to the University of Kent, where he studied for a PhD under Scarlett Thomas. He currently teaches creative writing at the University of Warwick. His debut novel, We Are The End, was published by Galley Beggar Press in 2017. His second novel, Telenovela...

Ledia Xhoga (pronounced Joga) is a fiction writer and playwright. She was born and raised in Tirana, Albania and currently lives in Brooklyn. Her debut novel Misinterpretation was published by Tin House Books (US & Canada) and Daunt Books (UK). Misinterpretation was longlisted for the 2025 Booker Prize, the recipient of a New York City Book Award, Finalist for Center For Fiction First Novel Prize...

An award-winning author, theatre artist and spoken word poet, Dr.  Cristina  A.  Bejan  has published books in all of her genres (history, poetry, playwriting). Her plays have been performed in 4 countries and her hit play DISTRICTLAND was bought for TV development. She has appeared as an expert on A&E's The History Channel, C-SPAN, and multiple Romanian TV channels. Her work has been featured in...

Daniel Peña is a Pushcart Prize-winning writer and Associate Professor at the University of North Texas where he teaches in the PhD Program in Creative Writing.  Formerly, he was based out of the UNAM in Mexico City where he worked as Fulbright-Garcia Robles Scholar. A graduate of Cornell University and a former Picador Guest Professor in Leipzig, Germany, his writing has appeared in Ploughshares,...

Tayyba Kanwal is a Pakistani-American writer from Houston, TX. Her short story collection, Talking with Boys, has been published in January 2026 by Black Lawrence Press. Her award-winning work has appeared in journals such as Wasafiri, Witness, Gulf Coast and Meridian. She holds an MFA from the University of Houston where she was an Inprint C. Glenn Cambor Fellow, and an MS from the University of...

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 Supernatural Fiction Award and a 2023 ThrillPit mentorship. We discussed writing in a second language, the influen...

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 been supported by Tin House, Grant...

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. Her debut novel, Slanting Towards the Sea , will so...

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 Ploughshares , The Cincinnati Review , Pleiades , Mississippi Review , Th...