Heidi Marjamäki: There is no such thing as good enough
Chosen Tongue
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 influence of her Finnish heritage, and the creative freedom found in Berlin’s literary community. Heidi also spoke about translingual storytelling, her editorial work, and the value of embracing mistakes...
info_outline
Sneha Subramanian Kanta: The Cartography of Language
Chosen Tongue
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, Granta, the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, and others. We discussed her journey as a bilingual poet writing in English and Hindi, the emotional weight of ancestral exile, and the cultural memory that...
info_outline
Lidija Hilje: Doubting and doing it anyway
Chosen Tongue
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 soon be published by Simon & Schuster in the US and Daunt Books in the UK. In this episode, we discussed Lidija's journey from law to literature, the shift from writing in Croatian to English,...
info_outline
Leila Farjami: Persian is the river, English the sea
Chosen Tongue
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, The Penn Review, and many other journals and anthologies. She’s the recipient of The Cincinnati Review’s Schiff Award in poetry and has been recognized as a finalist for the Prufer Poetry Prize and...
info_outline
Vesna Main: Belonging is overrated
Chosen Tongue
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 Only A Lodger… And Hardly That, and her most recent novel Waiting for A Party, which features a nonagenarian woman yearning for intimacy in prose that echoes Molly Bloom. We discussed writing in a second language, her interest in autofiction, and the themes of identity and belonging that run through her...
info_outline
Balsam Karam: The known becomes more beautiful when the foreign enters
Chosen Tongue
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 Singularity—originally published in Sweden in 2021 and released in English by Fitzcarraldo Editions in 2024—was shortlisted for the European Union Prize for Literature, the August Prize, and Svenska Dagbladet’s Literature Prize. We discussed her experiences as an...
info_outline
Thea Lenarduzzi: Stay Open to All the Languages
Chosen Tongue
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, fairy tale and folklore to explore power and its abuses (forthcoming, October 2025; preorder: ). She is working on a biography of Natalia Ginzburg, Collapsing...
info_outline
Ani Gjika: The Language of Freedom
Chosen Tongue
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 (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 memoir, , (Restless Books, 2023), which was a 2023 Foreword INDIES winner and on the 2024 Massachusetts Book Award longlist for nonfiction. Gjika is a recipient of...
info_outline
Julie Irigaray: The Hidden Dangers of Feedback
Chosen Tongue
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 roots, the creative freedom of writing in English and the shifting experience of being both outsider and insider in the UK. Julie also opened up about her writing...
info_outline
Elizabeth Torres: Every Language is a Codex
Chosen Tongue
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 representation through various media and has authored over 20 poetry books in multiple languages, contributing to numerous anthologies worldwide. In 2022 Elizabeth was the...
info_outlineAlison Mooney is a poet, storyteller and dancer who has lived in France, the US, Ireland, Germany, and now lives in Brussels. For many years she worked across Europe in the private sector, before joining the European Parliament 10 years ago. In 2020, Alison won the Cicero Speechwriting Award, from the US Professional Speechwriters Association, for a poetic motivational speech. In 2022, she was appointed speechwriter to the President of the European Parliament. In 2023, Alison self-published a collection of multilingual poetry: Balance – in mind, in body, in soul. The first edition was sold out within weeks and Alison has been giving poetry readings in Brussels, Dublin, Connemara, and France.
Her multilingual poetry collection is a journey on a tight-rope in search of balance: in mind, in body, in soul. Accompanyied by photography from award-winning photographer Sean Hayes, Alison Mooney’s book is graphically built like an art triptych. On one side, poems of grief, on the other poems of healing and suspended in the centre a speech on finding balance.
You can listen to Alison's prize-winning motivational speech here.
Here, you can listen to Alison reading her poem Beyond You, from her collection.