Sneha Subramanian Kanta: The Cartography of Language
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 shapes her work. She spoke about translating her own poems, navigating identity across languages, and offered advice to writers working between linguistic worlds.
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Lidija Hilje: Doubting and doing it anyway
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, and the cultural expectations that shape storytelling. She spoke about the evolution of her novel, the complexities of translation, and the imposter syndrome she sometimes faces as a non-native English writer.
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Vesna Main: Belonging is overrated
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 work. Vesna also spoke about the feeling of never quite arriving, and why she sees writing as a lifelong act of hope.
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Thea Lenarduzzi: Stay Open to All the Languages
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: bit.ly/42kdRI4). She is working on a biography of Natalia Ginzburg, Collapsing Houses: Pieces of Natalia Ginzburg. We discussed Thea's experience of living and writing between two cultures and what it means to of it, a British-Italian identity. Thea reflected on the legacy of her family history in Dandelions, the feeling of being at home in two places and the influence of her European schooling. She also spoke about her deep admiration for Ginzburg, the challenges of bilingual writing and the richness of embracing multiple languages in her creative life.
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Julie Irigaray: The Hidden Dangers of Feedback
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 process navigating feedback and an upcoming memoir on language and love for England.
Netherlands