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 Prix Femina des Lycéens, while her earlier Antonia received the Grand Prix de l'héroïne Madame Figaro.

Gabriella has no mother tongue, and writes in French because it's the language that structured her and the one that gives her distance from Italian. We talk about her years as a painter, about disobedience as the thread through all her books, and about why the only home she has is the act of writing itself, the one place she can hold all her confusion and make something of it.

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 Professor of Poetry at the University of Virginia where she teaches in the MFA and undergraduate Creative Writing programs. Petrosino is the recipient of a DeWitt Wallace/Readers Digest fellowship from MacDowell artist residency, a Pushcart Prize, a Fellowship in Creative Writing from the National Endowment for the Arts, the UNT Rilke Prize, & the Spalding Prize, among other honors.

We talk about growing up in a half-Italian American family, where she heard Italian spoken by her grandfather and her father but was never invited inside the conversation, and how that hatched a longing to learn the language. She talks about the season in Florence at twenty when she fell in love and had her heart broken for the first time, and how Italian has stayed for her a language of love and family and also of heartbreak and loneliness. We get into her sense of belonging to one country by the right of soil and another by the right of blood, and why she holds both of those metaphors with care, since each can gather people in or shut them out. And we talk about the spectral, thinner self who emerges when her Italian breaks through, and the constant longing between her two languages and the two selves that live inside them.

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 about how she gradually found her way into writing fiction in English after leaving Sweden at nineteen, and how years of working as a translator shaped her sense of language as something closer to meaning than to individual words. She talks about never having been schooled in English, and how that freed her from the fear of getting it wrong that native speakers often carry. She talks about reaching into Old English and Old Norse for her current novel, and about the deliberate discipline of keeping her Swedish children's writing free of English influence. And we get into what English has let her see clearly about her own upbringing that Swedish never could, and the story she still doesn't have the words for.

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.