Chosen Tongue

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.

Ova Ceren writes bittersweet tales of heartbreak and magic, often inspired by Turkish and Ottoman folklore. Blessed (or perhaps cursed) with a mathematical brain, she earned a degree in Computer Science and a master's that led her into a career in IT, taking her from Türkiye to Britain. After years of wrestling with algorithms in corporate jungles, she finally eloped with a debut novel instead. Ova now lives in Cambridge, UK, with her husband, son, and a spirited flock of runner ducks. She is also the creator of the popular Instagram and TikTok channels @excusemyreading.

In this conversation, Ova reflects on writing in English as an immigrant writer, and on the delicate act of translating a culture, and a self, for a foreign audience.
We talk about language and belonging, about choosing imagination over certainty, and about what it means to build a literary voice far from home.

Sophie Lewis is a London-born translator and editor. Working from French and Portuguese, she has translated books by Marcel Aymé, Josephine Baker, Hélène Cixous, Annie Ernaux, Violette Leduc, Noémi Lefebvre, Nastassja Martin, Françoise Sagan, Leïla Slimani, Stendhal and Jules Verne; also Victor Heringer, Patrícia Melo, Sheyla Smanioto and Micheliny Verunschk, among others. For six years she was principal editor at publisher And Other Stories, and her most recent in-house position was as managing editor at The Folio Society. With Gitanjali Patel, she co-founded Shadow Heroes translation workshops. Lewis's translations have been shortlisted for the Scott Moncrieff and Republic of Consciousness prizes, and longlisted for the International Booker Prize. In 2022, she won the French-American Foundation's prize for non-fiction translation.
In this episode, Sophie speaks about translating Hélène Cixous's Angst, and about the intellectual, ethical, and stylistic decisions that shape a translator's work.
We talk about voice and fidelity, humour and idiom, and about what it means to write in English while carrying another language inside the sentence.