Chosen Tongue

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.