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 Pushcart Prize, Best Small Fictions, and Best Microfiction. He also edits the literary journal The Bulb Region.

We talk about growing up in Izmir steeped in American movies, music, and literature despite being educated in British English, and how that early, half-fabricated version of America made its way into his fiction. He talks about the gap he found between that imagined America and the real one once he actually lived there, and how the fascination survived the disillusion anyway. And we get into how he moves between Turkish and English, writing fiction mostly in English but reaching for Turkish when he's thinking in essays, and how he experiences something close to two different personas depending on which language he's in.

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 writing fiction in English rather than moving over from Turkish, and about estrangement as the subject that keeps finding its way into her books whether she plans it or not. She talks about the private language couples invent together, and about resisting the pressure, common for writers working in a second language, to write as a representative of a background rather than simply as a writer. And we get into what home has meant to her across languages and cities, and how that's shifted since becoming a mother.

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, and her decision to write those characters in clean English rather than give them an accent on the page. And we get into how the war changed her own relationship to Russian, and how English became, for her, a kind of neutral ground.

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 to translate ancient prose as a poet rather than a classicist and why he calls his approach to meditations literary prose rather than strict translation. We get into how Aaron sees his own role in translation, less as a craftsman working on a fixed text than as a kind of spiritual medium, channeling Marcus Aurelius back to life.

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 nominated for Best Screenplay at the Italian Golden Globes, and she serves as a Literature Advisor at the American Academy in Rome.

We talk about her move from Rome to California as a teenager and the binary life that split created, and about writing her latest book, a memoir set between Los Angeles and Rome, in English even though it was commissioned in Italian. She talks about juggling two languages on the page, and her conversation with Jhumpa Lahiri about what she calls a hybrid text, one that can feel like a betrayal of both languages at once. And we get into exile as a feeling of not fully belonging anywhere, and writing as a way of holding two identities together rather than picking one.

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 English and French.

We talk about growing up between English and Korean without fully belonging to either, and how he found French later, through Rimbaud, as a language that felt entirely his own choice. David talks about how French grammar suits the way he thinks better than English does, and about living in Paris, where he felt more visible as a minority than he does in the US. Finally, we get into the difficulty of being read as a bilingual writer, and David's recent decision to write more in French, partly as a way of holding onto the language from outside a French-speaking country.

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 Angeles Times Book Prizes, an American Book Award, the Folio Prize, and the 2021 International Dublin Literary Award. Her work has been translated into more than thirty languages. Her latest novel, Beginning Middle End, will be published in the US on July 28th by Knopf. We talk about how Valeria came to write her first novel in Spanish, even though English was the language she thought and studied in. And we also get into how she actually writes across two languages, since for Valeria it isn't a clean switch, but something closer to chaotic crossfade, with parts of a novel written in one language and then rewritten rather than simply translated into the other.

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 talk about mastering English while losing the emotional vocabulary of your first language, about imposter syndrome and dissociation, and about what it means to spend a lifetime being the bridge between worlds.

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 international literary festival. She now lives in Copenhagen.

Her debut short story collection, Chinese on the Beach, was published by Ybernia in 2025. In this episode, we talk about what it means to write across languages, why English became her creative home, and what happens to identity when you've never quite belonged to just one place. We also get into Vanessa's next project, which takes her somewhere new: the world of Soviet-era ballet.